The 1930s revisited: Crash

course: what the Great

Depression reveals about our future
It was the biggest setback to the global economy since the dawn of the modern
industrial age. But did the world’s reaction worsen the effects of the 1929 Crash?
And have we learned from those mistakes? by Larry Elliott
As the summer of 1929 drew to a close, the celebrated Yale university economist Irving Fisher
took to the pages of the New York Times to opine about Wall Street. Share prices had been
rising all year; investors had been speculating with borrowed money on the assumption that the
good times would continue. It was the bull market of all time, and those taking a punt wanted
reassurance that their money was safe.
Fisher provided it for them, predicting confidently: “Stock markets have reached what looks like
a permanently high plateau.” On that day, the Wall Street Crash of October 1929 was less than
two months away. It was the worst share tip in history. Nothing else comes close.
The crisis broke on Thursday 24 October, when the market dropped by 11%. Black Thursday
was followed by a 13% fall on Black Monday and a further 12% tumble on Black Tuesday. By
early November, Fisher was ruined and the stock market was in a downward spiral that would
only bottom out in June 1932, at which point companies quoted on the New York stock
exchange had lost 90% of their value and the world had changed utterly.
The Great Crash was followed by the Great Depression, the biggest setback to the global
economy since the dawn of the modern industrial age in the middle of the 18th century. Within
three years of Fisher’s ill-judged prediction, a quarter of America’s working population was
unemployed and desperate. As the economist JK Galbraith put it: “Some people were hungry in
1930 and 1931 and 1932. Others were tortured by the fear that they might go hungry.”
Banks that weren’t failing were foreclosing on debtors. There was no welfare state to cushion
the fall for those such as John Steinbeck’s Okies – farmers caught between rising debts and
crashing commodity prices. One estimate suggests 34 million Americans had no income at all.
By mid-1932, the do-nothing approach of Herbert Hoover was discredited and the Democrat
Franklin Roosevelt was on course to become US president.
Across the Atlantic, Germany was suffering its second economic calamity in less than a
decade. In 1923, the vindictive peace terms imposed by the Treaty of Versailles had helped to
create the conditions for hyperinflation, when one dollar could be exchanged for 4.2 trillion
marks, people carted wheelbarrows full of useless notes through the streets, and cigarettes
were used as money. In 1932, a savage austerity programme left 6 million unemployed.
Germany suffered as the pound fell and rival British exports became cheaper. More than 40%
of Germany’s industrial workers were idle and Nazi brownshirts were fighting communists for
control of the streets. By 1932, the austerity policies of the German chancellor Heinrich Brüning
were discredited and Adolf Hitler was on course to replace him.

Timeline of Turmoil
1929, 24 October
The Wall Street Crash begins, resulting in losses of $50bn between 1929 and 1931, and the
worst economic depression in US history.
1930, 17 June
The US Congress passes the Smoot-Hawley tariff, raising import duties sharply to protect
American manufacturers from foreign competition. Global trade falls by 66% from 1929 to 1934.
1930, 12 August
Clarence Birdseye’s quick-freezing process introduces the world to frozen food.
1931, 22-23 August
Britain’s first Labour Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, offers his resignation after his
austerity budget is voted down. King George V urges him to form a coalition government.
1931, 27 October
MacDonald is re-elected at the head of a new ‘national government’, enabling the austerity
measures to be introduced.
1932, 1 October
Sir Oswald Mosley founds the British Union of Fascists.
1932, 8 November
Franklin D Roosevelt defeats incumbent Herbert Hoover for his first of unprecedented four US
presidential terms.
1933, 30 January
Adolf Hitler becomes chancellor of Germany.
1933, 27 February
An arson attack on Berlin’s Reichstag (parliament building) is blamed on the Communist party,
causing it to be banned and giving Hitler’s Nazi party a clear majority in government.
1933, 9 March-16 June
Roosevelt’s New Deal social and economic programmes are passed by the US Congress
during a special 100-day session.
1933, 22 March
Germany’s first concentration camp opens at Dachau, near Munich. (There, amongst others
prisoners produced weapons.)
1933, 10 May
Head of propaganda Joseph Goebbels encourages the burning of 20,000 “un-German” books.
1933, 14 July
All political parties except the Nazis are banned in Germany.
1934, 19 July
Britain begins to re-arm by adding 12 squadrons to the Royal Air Force.
1934, 2 August
Germany’s President Hindenburg dies. Hitler combines the posts of president and chancellor,
and calls himself “Fȕhrer”.
1935, 11 April
Britain, France and Italy convene to discuss German rearmament.
1935, 14 April
Following years of drought and over-ploughing in America’s Great Plains, “Black Sunday” sees
20 massive dust storms – one of the worst events in the dust bowl period.
1935, 7 June
Conservative Stanley Baldwin becomes prime minister for the third time, following MacDonald’s
resignation due to ill health.
1935, 30 July
The first 10 Penguin paperbacks go on sale in Britain, including works of Ernest Hemingway
and Agatha Christie.
1935, 15 September
Marriage and sexual relationships between Jews and persons of “German or German-related
blood” are banned in Germany.
1936, 20 January
British King George V dies and is succeeded by Edward VIII.
1936, 3 August
American athlete Jesse Owens wins the first of four Olympic gold medals in front of Adolf Hitler
at the Berlin games.
1936, 5-31 October
Unemployed workers from Jarrow, South Tyneside, march 300 miles to London to deliver a
petition to parliament asking for a steelworks to replace the recently closed local shipyard.
1936, 10 December
Edward VIII abdicates in order to marry American divorcee Wallace Simpson. His younger
brother is crowned George VI the following May.
1937, 26 April
The Basque town of Guernica in northern Spain is bombed by the German and Italian forces.
1937, 6 May
The German airship Hindenburg catches fire while trying to land in New Jersey, killing 36
people.
1937, 29 December
Ireland draws up a new constitution that omits any reference to its place within the British
Empire. Irish Free State leader Éamon de Valerabecomes Taoiseach, equivalent of prime
minister.
1938, 12 February
The first refugee children of the Kindertransport programme arrive in Britain. In all, 10,000
Jewish children are sent from Germany, Austriaand Czechoslovakia to Britain before the
second world war starts in September, 1939.
1938, 12 March
Germany occupies and then annexes Austria in the Anschluss – a union forbidden by the treaty
of Versailles. German soldiers marching into Austria are welcomed by cheering crowds.
1938, 28-30 September
At the Munich Conference, Britain, Germany, France and Italy agree that the Czechoslovakian
territory of the Sudetenland and its 3 million ethnic Germans should be joined with Germany.
British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain claims he has achieved “peace in our time”.
1938, 30 October
Orson Welles allegedly causes a nationwide scare in the US with the first broadcast of his War
of the Worlds radio drama, featuring fake news bulletinsstating that a Martian invasion had
begun.
1938, 9 November
Goebbels organises Kristallnacht, during which 7,500 Jewish shops are destroyed and 400
synagogues burnt down across Germany.
1939, 15 March
Germany invades and occupies Czechoslovakia, in contravention of the Munich agreement.
1939, 31 March
Britain guarantees territorial integrity of Poland, formally ending its policy of appeasement. The
British government reluctantly begins to prepare for war.
1939, 14 April
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck’s acclaimed novel about a poor family forced to leave
Oklahoma because of the dust bowl, is published.
1939, 23 August
Hitler and the Soviet Union’s leader Joseph Stalin sign the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact.
1939, 3 September
Britain declares war on Germany, following its invasion of Poland two days earlier.
It would be wrong to think nobody saw the crisis coming. Fisher’s prediction may well have
been a riposte to a quite different (and remarkably accurate) prediction made by the investment
adviser Roger Babson in early September 1929. Babson told the US National Business
Conference that a crash was coming and that it would be a bad one. “Factories will shut down,”
Babson predicted, “men will be thrown out of work.” Anticipating how the slump would feed on
itself, he warned: “The vicious cycle will get in and the result will be a serious business
depression.”
Cassandras are ignored until it is too late. And Babson, who had form as a pessimist, was duly
ignored. The Dr Doom of the 2008 crisis, New York University’s Nouriel Roubini, suffered the
same fate.
F Scott Fitzgerald described the Great Crash as the moment the jazz age dived to its death. It
marked the passing of a first age of globalisation that had flourished in the decades before the
first world war with free movements of capital, freedom and – to a lesser extent – goods. In the
decade or so after the guns fell silent in 1918, policymakers had been trying to re-create what
they saw as a golden period of liberalism. The Great Depression put paid to those plans,
ushering in, instead, an era of isolationism, protectionism, aggressive nationalism and
totalitarianism. There was no meaningful recovery until nations took up arms again in 1939.
In Britain, recovery was concentrated in the south of England and too weak to dent ingrained
unemployment in the old industrial areas. The Jarrow march for jobs took place in 1936, seven
years after the start of the crisis. It was a similar story in the US, where a recovery during who
lost a packet in the Crash, described the period 1914 to 1945 as the second 30 years’ war.
Only one other financial meltdown can compare to the Wall Street Crash for the length of its
impact: the one that hit a climax with the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in September 2008.
Without the Great Depression, there would have been no New Deal and no Keynesian
revolution in economics. Roosevelt might never have progressed beyond the New York
governor’s mansion in Albany. Hitler, whose political star was on the wane by the late 1920s,
would have been a historical footnote.
Similarly, without the long-lingering effects of the 2008 crash, there would have been no Brexit,
Donald Trump would still be a New York City builder and Europe would not be quaking at the
possibility of Marine Le Pen replacing François Hollande as French president.
Not since the 1930s have there been such acute fears of a populist backlash against the
prevailing orthodoxy. As then, a prolonged period of poor economic performance has led to a
political reaction that looks like feeding back into a desire for a different economic approach.
The early 30s share with the mid-2010s a sense that the political establishment has lost the
confidence of large numbers of voters, who have rejected “business as usual” and backed
politicians they see as challenging the status quo.
Trump is not the first president to urge an America-first policy: Roosevelt was of a similar mind
after he replaced Herbert Hoover in 1933. Nor is this the first time there has been such a wide
gulf between Wall Street and the rest of the country. The loathing of the bankers in the 20s
hardened into a desire for retribution in the 30s.
According to Lord Robert Skidelsky, biographer of John Maynard Keynes: “We got into the
Great Depression for the same reason as in 2008: there was a great pile of debt, there was
gambling on margin on the stock market, there was over-inflation of assets, and interest rates
were too high to support a full employment level of investment.”
There are other similarities. The 20s had been good for owners of assets but not for workers.
There had been a sharp increase in unemployment at the start of the decade and labour
markets had not fully recovered by the time an even bigger slump began in 1929. But while
employees saw their slice of the economic cake get smaller, for the rich and powerful, the
Roaring Twenties were the best of times. In the US, the halving of the top rate of income tax to
32% meant more money for speculation in the stock and property markets. Share prices rose
sixfold on Wall Street in the decade leading up to the Wall Street Crash.
Inequality was high and rising, and demand only maintained through a credit bubble.
Unemployment between 1921 and 1929 averaged 8% in the US, 9% in Germany and 12% in
Britain. Labour markets had never really recovered from a severe recession at the start of the
20s designed to stamp out a post-war inflationary boom.
Above all, in both periods global politics were in flux. From around 1890, the balance of power
between the great European nations that had kept the peace for three quarters of a century
after the battle of Waterloo in 1815 started to break down. The Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian
empires were in decline before the first world war; the US, Germany and Russia were on the
rise.
More importantly, Britain, which had been the linchpin of late 19th-century globalisation had
been weakened by the first world war and was no longer able to provide the leadership role.
America was not yet ready to take up the mantle.
Stephen King, senior economic adviser to HSBC and author of a forthcoming book on the crisis
of globalisation, Grave New World, says: “There are similarities between now and the 1920 and
1930s in the sense that you had a declining superpower. Britain was declining then and the US
is potentially declining now.”
King says that in the 20s, the idea of a world ruled by empires was crumbling. Eventually, the
US did take on Britain’s role as the defender of western values, but not until the 40s, when it
was pivotal in both defeating totalitarianism and in creating the economic and political
institutions – the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank – that were
designed to ensure the calamitous events of the 30s never happened again.
“There are severe doubts about whether the US is able or willing to play the role it played in the
second half of the 20th century, and that’s worrisome because if the US is not playing it, who
does? If nobody is prepared to play that role, the question is whether we are moving towards a
more chaotic era.”

Deflationary disaster
There are, of course, differences as well as similarities between the two epochs. At this year’s
meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, held in the week of Trump’s
inauguration, members of the global business elite found reasons to be cheerful.
Some took comfort from technology: the idea that Facebook, Snapchat and Google have
shrunk the world. Others said slapping tariffs on imported goods in an era of complex
international supply chains would push up the cost of exports and make it unthinkable even for
a country as big as the US to adopt a go-it-alone economic strategy. Roberto Azevêdo,
managing director of the World Trade Organisation said: “The big difference between the
financial crisis of 2008 and the early 1930s is that today we have multilateral trade rules, and in
the 30s we didn’t.”
The biggest difference between the two crises, however, is that in the early 1930s blunders by
central banks and finance ministries made matters a lot worse than they need have been. Not
all stock market crashes morph into slumps, and one was avoided – just about – in the period
after the collapse of Lehman Brothers.
Early signs from data for industrial production and world trade in late 2008 showed declines
akin to those during the first months of the Great Depression. Policymakers have been rightly
castigated for being asleep at the wheel while the sub-prime mortgage crisis was gestating, but
knowing some economic history helped when Lehman Brothers went bust. In the early 30s,
central banks waited too long to cut interest rates and allowed deflation to set in. There was a
policy of malign neglect towards the banks, which were allowed to go bust in droves. Faced
with higher budget deficits caused by higher unemployment and slower growth, finance
ministers made matters worse by raising taxes and cutting spending.
The response to the Crash, according to Adam Tooze in his book The Deluge, was deflationary
policies were pursued everywhere. “The question that critics have asked ever since is why the
world was so eager to commit to this collective austerity. If Keynesian and monetarist
economists can agree on one thing, it is the disastrous consequences of this deflationary
consensus.”
At the heart of this consensus was the gold standard, the strongly held belief that it should be
possible to exchange pounds, dollars, marks or francs for gold at a fixed exchange rate. The
system had its own automatic regulatory process: if a country lived beyond its means and ran a
current account surplus, gold would flow out and would only return once policy had been
tightened to reduce imports.
After concerted efforts by the Bank of England and the Treasury, Britain returned to the gold
standard in 1925 at its pre-war parity of $4.86. This involved a rise in the exchange rate that
made life more difficult for exporters.
What the policymakers failed to realise was that the world had moved on since the pre-1914
era. Despite being on the winning side, Britain’s economy was much weaker. Germany’s
economy had also suffered between 1914 and 1918, and was further hobbled by reparations.
America, by contrast, was in a much stronger position.
This changing balance of power meant that restoring the pre-war regime was a long and painful
process, and by the late 20s the strains of attempting to do so were starting to become
unbearable in just the same way as the strains on the euro – the closest modern equivalent to
the gold standard – have become evident since 2008.
Instead of easing off, policymakers in the early stages of the Great Depression thought the
answer was to redouble their efforts. Peter Temin, an economic historian, compares central
banks and finance ministries to the 18th-century doctors who treated Mozart with mercury: “Not
only were they singularly ineffective in curing the economic disease; they also killed the
patient.”
Skidelsky explains that in Britain, the so-called “automatic stabilisers” kicked in during the early
stages of the crisis. Tax revenues fell because growth was weaker while spending on
unemployment benefits rose. The public finances fell into the red.
Instead of welcoming the extra borrowing as a cushion against a deeper recession, the
authorities took steps to balance the budget. Ramsay MacDonald’s government set up the May
committee to see what could be done about the deficit. Given the membership, heavily
weighted in favour of businessmen, the outcome was never in doubt: sterling was under
pressure and in order to maintain Britain’s gold standard parity, the May committee
recommended cuts of £97m from the state’s £885m budget. Unemployment pay was to be cut
by 30% in order to balance the budget within a year.
The severity of the cuts split the Labour government and prompted the formation of a national
government led by MacDonald. Philip Snowden, the chancellor, said the alternative to the
status quo was “the Deluge”. Financial editors were invited to the Treasury to be briefed on
measures being taken to protect the pound, and when one asked whether Britain should or
could stay on the gold standard, the Treasury mandarin Sir Warren Hastings rose to his feet
and thundered: “To suggest we should leave the gold standard is an affront not only to the
national honour, but to the personal honour of every man or woman in the country.”
The show of fiscal masochism failed to prevent fresh selling of the pound, and eventually the
pressure became unbearable. In September 1931, Britain provided as big a shock to the rest of
the world as it did on 23 June 2016, by coming off the gold standard.
The pound fell and the boost to UK exports was reinforced six months later when the coalition
government announced a policy of imperial preference, the erection of tariff barriers around
colonies and former colonies such as Australia and New Zealand.
Britain was not the first country to resort to protectionism. The now infamous Smoot-Hawley
tariff had been announced in the US in 1930. But America had a recent history of protectionism
– it had built up its manufacturing strength behind a 40% tariff in the second half of the 19th
century. Britain, as Tooze explains, had been in favour of free trade since the repeal of the Corn
Laws in 1846.
“Now it was responsible for initiating the death spiral of protectionism and beggar-thy-neighbour
currency wars that would tear the global economy apart.”
Britain’s 1931 exit from the gold standard meant it secured first-mover advantage over its main
rivals. For Germany, the pain was especially severe, since the country’s mountain of foreign
debt ruled out devaluation and left Chancellor Brüning’s government with the choice between
default and deflation. Brüning settled for another round of austerity, not realising that for voters
there was a third choice: a party that insisted that national solutions were the answer to a
broken international system.
The reason borrowing costs were slashed in 2008 is that central bankers knew their history.
Ben Bernanke, then chairman of America’s Federal Reserve, was a student of the Great
Depression and fully acknowledged that his institution could not afford to make the same
mistake twice. Interest rates were cut to barely above zero; money was created through the
process known as quantitative easing; the banks were bailed out; Barack Obama pushed a
fiscal stimulus programme through Congress.
But the policy was only a partial success. Low interest rates and quantitative easing have
averted Great Depression 2.0 by flooding economies with cheap money. This has driven up the
prices of assets – shares, bonds and houses – to the benefit of those who are rich or
comfortably off.
For those not doing so well, it has been a different story. Wage increases have been hard to
come by, and the strong desire of governments to reduce budget deficits has resulted in
unpopular austerity measures. Not all the lessons of the 1930s have been well learned, and the
over-hasty tightening of fiscal policy has slowed growth and caused political alienation among
those who feel they are being punished for a crisis they did not create, while the real villains get
away scot-free. A familiar refrain in both the referendum on Brexit and the 2016 US presidential
election was: there might be a recovery going on, but it’s not happening around here.

Authoritarian solutions
Internationalism died in the early 30s because it came to be associated with discredited
policies: rampant speculation, mass unemployment, permanent austerity and falling living
standards.
Totalitarian states promoted themselves as alternatives to failed and decrepit liberal
democracies. Hitler’s Germany was one, Stalin’s Soviet Union another. While the first era of
globalisation was breaking up, Moscow was pushing ahead with the collectivisation of
agriculture and rapid industrialisation.
What’s more, the economic record of the totalitarian countries in the 30s was far superior to that
of the liberal democracies. Growth averaged 0.3% a year in Britain, the US and France,
compared with 3.1% a year in Germany, Italy, Japan and the Soviet Union.
Erik Britton, founder of the consultancy Fathom, says: “The 1920s saw the failure of liberal free-
trade, free-market policies to deliver stability and growth. Alternative people came along with a
populist stance that really worked, for a while.”
There is, Britton says, a reason mainstream parties are currently being rejected: “It is not safe
to assume you can deliver unsatisfactory economic outcomes for a decade without a political
reaction that feeds back into the economics.”
Economic devastation caused by the Great Depression did eventually force western
democracies into rethinking policy. The key period was the 18 months between Britain coming
off the gold standard in September 1931 and Roosevelt’s arrival in the White House in March
1933.
Under Hoover, US economic policy had been relentlessly deflationary. As in Germany – the
other country to suffer most grievously from the Depression – there was a dogged insistence on
protecting the currency and on balancing the budget.
That changed under FDR. Policy became both more interventionist and more isolationist. If
London could adopt a Britain-first policy, then so could Washington. Roosevelt swiftly took the
dollar off the gold standard and scuppered attempts to prevent currency wars. Wall Street was
reined in; fiscal policy was loosened. But it was too late. By then, Hitler was chancellor and
tightening his grip on power. Ultimately, the Depression was brought to an end not by the New
Deal, but by war.
King says the world is already starting to become more protectionist in terms of movement of
capital and labour. Trump has been naming and shaming US companies seeking to take
advantage of cheaper labour in the emerging countries, while Brexit is an example of the idea
that migration needs to be controlled.
The US supported the post-war global instutional framework: the UN, IMF and European Union,
through the Marshall plan. “It tried to create a framework in which individual countries could
flourish,” King adds. “But I don’t see that [happening again] in the future, which creates
difficulties for the rest of the world.”
So far, financial markets have taken a positive view of Trump. They have concentrated on the
growth potential of his plans for tax cuts and higher infrastructure spending, rather than his
threat to build a wall along the Rio Grande and to slap tariffs on Mexican and Chinese imports.
There is, though, a darker vision of the future, where every country tries to do what Trump is
doing. In this scenario, a shrinking global economy leads to shrinking global trade, and deflation
means personal debts become more onerous. “It becomes a vicious, self-fulfilling cycle,” Britton
says. “People seek answers and find it in authoritarianism, populism and protectionism. If one
country can show it works, there is a strong temptation for others to follow suit.”
This may prove too pessimistic. The global economy is growing by around 3% a year; Britain
and the US (if not the Eurozone) have seen unemployment halve since the 2008-09 crisis; low
oil prices have kept inflation low and led to rising living standards.
Even so, it is not hard to see why support for the policy ideas that have driven the second era of
globalisation – free movement of capital, goods and people – has started to fracture. The
winners from the liberal economic system that emerged at the end of the cold war have, like
their forebears in the 20s, failed to look out for the losers. A rising tide has not lifted all boats,
and those who do not consider themselves the beneficiaries of globalisation have grown weary
of hearing how marvellous it is.
The 30s are proof that nothing in economics is inevitable. There was eventually a backlash
against the economic orthodoxies and Skidelsky can see why there is another backlash
happening today. “Globalisation enables capital to escape national and union control. I am
much more sympathetic since the start of the crisis to the Marxist way of analysing things.
“Trump will be impeached, assassinated or frustrated by Congress,” Skidelsky suggests. “Or he
will remain popular enough to overcome the liberal consensus that he is a shit of the first order.
After all, a lot of people agree with what he is doing.”

Are the 2010s really like the 1930s? The truth about life
in the Great Depression
Record unemployment, costly healthcare, a massive north-south divide, rat-
infested slums – and movie palaces, dance halls and lidos. Juliet Gardiner kicks
off our special focus on the 1930s with a look at daily life in Britain by Juliet
Gardiner, the author of The Thirties: An Intimate History
Commentators often point to parallels between the current era is and the 1930s – whether they
are discussing geopolitics, state benefits or even “alternative facts”.
There are many striking similarities, but significant differences, too – as the Guardian’s special
focus on the 1930s will demonstrate, by re-examining the key events, disputes and cultural
trends of what the poet WH Auden termed “a low, dishonest decade”.
In Britain, the Great Depression led to record unemployment, mainly in north-east England, the
Scottish lowlands and the mining villages of south Wales. With nearly 4 million out of work,
these regional variations deepened the existing wealth divide between north and south – which
continues to this day.
This lasting division underpins some of the most iconic images of the 30s: photographs of
“hunger marches”, in which unemployed men and women trekked from Britain’s distressed
areas to London to make southerners aware of the dire conditions under which they lived, and
the seeming inability of the government to do anything about alleviating them (the Labour prime
minister Ramsay MacDonald refused to accept the marchers’ petitions).
Workers’ unemployment benefits were cut off after six months, and the harshest measure of all
was the means test, introduced in 1931. If a family could not afford to pay the rent, their
furniture and other assets would be seized.
Although there is no formal means test today in Britain, benefits not based on national
insurance contributions are still assessed on a household’s income and are being cut back on a
considerable scale.
In the 30s, Britain’s medical safety net – the NHS – was still a distant dream. If you were ill, you
had to go to a “panel” doctor if you were eligible, or see a sixpenny doctor who would treat you
for a fee. Cottage hospitals were chronically underfunded and under-resourced, and had to rely
on donations and “flag days”.
In 1937, only about 4 million manual workers were entitled to a holiday with pay, out of a total
workforce of 18.5 million. The Holiday With Pay Act the following year extended these rights.
For the lucky few, this meant a week at a seaside resort; for the rest, day trips with a picnic –
travelling by car, Greenline bus or motorcycle (with sidecar) to stay in a holiday camp or a
boarding house, where guests were obliged to go out after breakfast and stay out until supper
time. Only the very wealthy could afford foreign holidays.
In 1936, many young and idealistic British men did, though, ignore a government ban and travel
to Spain to fight for the republican army against the fascist leader General Franco.
The countdown to another world war, and the proliferation of home appliances such as washing
machines, dishwashers and efficient vacuum cleaners, led to a huge change in women’s lives –
helping them to take up employment outside the home. In the 30s, however, the average young
woman was still married straight from her parents’ house, while divorce was usually too costly
for working-class couples: they simply separated.
Abortion was illegal, so those who could afford to do so went to an “osteopath” or similarly
misnamed doctor. For the poor, the options were drinking gin in a boiling hot bath, or seeking a
backstreet abortion by a woman – probably with no training – working in insanitary conditions.
Housing was a seemingly intractable problem in the 30s, just as today. Then, the most urgent
need was demolishing thousands of overcrowded, vermin-infested slums. This slow task was
effectively completed in many cities in 1940-41 by German bombers, by which time the building
of a large number of houses in the suburbs had enabled many more middle-class Britons to
own property.
Today, the shortage of what is called affordable accommodation remains one of Britain’s most
pressing problems.
By the 1930s, cinema had taken over from theatre and music halls as the most popular
entertainment. By 1938, there were 4,967 cinemas, some huge: Green’s Playhouse in Glasgow
could accommodate more than 4,300 people. Most of these new cinemas were works of art,
decorated to look like an exotic tropical islands, Mediterranean resorts or Egyptian tombs.
More than 900m cinema tickets were sold in 1934, rising to an annual of 990m by the time war
broke out – a staggering average of nearly 20m viewings per week. Dancing, too, was a regular
night out, whether in intimate nightclubs or famous concert arenas. Most of those beloved
dance halls are long gone, having become bingo halls, which are themselves now struggling to
survive.
Despite all the dancing, many young men were not fit for military service because of
malnutrition and the impact of appalling living conditions. Britain’s poor performance at the
Olympic Games in 1936 instigated a nationwide keep-fit campaign, with local authorities
encouraged to make land available for outdoor activities. At least 130 swimming lidos were built
in Britain between 1930 and 1939.
Today, the cult of keeping fit is still manifest in the number of gyms and exercise classes all
over the country – although one aspect of the fitness craze has not generally been kept up. In
the 30s, a number of young men and women took to naked rambling in the countryside at
weekends: open-air nudism was considered an excellent path to health.
In this, perhaps, and in other, more serious ways, we should be grateful that, for all their
similarities, the differences between the two eras remain marked.
Hunger, outrage and bombs: how the Manchester Guardian reported the 1930s
From the bread lines of New York to the destruction of Guernica via an interview with Adolf
Hitler, extracts from the Manchester Guardian’s reports

The insufficiency of charity, by W McG Eager, 29 June 1931

I did not go to see a bread line in New York. The poor devils who queue up for relief in kind had,
I thought, been photographed and gazed at quite often enough. But within a few yards of the
Pennsylvania Terminal Station, I saw one morning an even more distressing picture – a dime
line.
Stretching for hundreds of yards, it must have numbered some thousands of men, marshalled
in platoons, with gaps here and there to allow foot traffic to cross the road.
The head of the queue was slowly filing past a Roman Catholic church to receive a coin from a
Franciscan monk. Some of the men removed their caps before they reached the giver; others
touched their caps as they received the alms; others, sunk in hebetude or fearful of risking
recognition, kept their headgear fast and passed on without a sign.
Now there is no doubt in anyone’s mind that savings are exhausted, family resources strained
to breaking-point, and the margin of temporary and part-time jobs cruelly restricted. The simple
expedient of running into debt is no longer effective.

Experiences on the road, from our London staff, 27 October 1932

These Lancashire protesters – they call themselves and are generally called “hunger-marchers”
– are nearly all sturdy young men in their twenties. Among them are many cotton operatives,
but there are workers in most of the important Lancashire industries – engineers, miners,
seamen, general labourers.
They carried red banners, some adorned with the hammer-and-sickle device. The banners bore
such inscriptions as “Down with the Means Test”, “Down with the National Government”, and
“Lancashire Protests Against the Baby-starvers”. These are men from Manchester, Liverpool,
and most of the cotton towns …
As they went along they collected their quota of signatures for the petition against the means
test, which is said to have been signed by about 1,000,000 people altogether. They invariably
held an open-air meeting in the towns, and have met with little opposition from the crowds. The
best test of the feeling towards them is the amount of money collected by the way, and this,
they report, has been much more than expected.
The two places where there was “trouble” were Birmingham and Stratford-on-Avon, and in both
cases apparently it followed from the fact that local voluntary arrangements were not adequate,
and the marchers were forced to go to the Poor Law institution for the night.
At Birmingham they strenuously objected to the breakfast of bread and margarine offered them
at the workhouse, their point being that they were not paupers. Accordingly they marched away
breakfastless, with a banner “We have had no breakfast”.

Famine in North Caucasus, [The writer of this article recently visited the North Caucasus
and the Ukraine in order to see for himself, and to record, how the collectivism of agriculture in
Soviet Russia was affecting the lives of the peasants.]; 25 March 1933
“How are things with you?” I asked one man. He looked around anxiously to see that no
soldiers were about. “We have nothing, absolutely nothing. They have taken everything away,”
he said, and hurried on.
This is what I heard again and again and again. “We have nothing. They have taken everything
away.” It was true. They had nothing. It was also true that everything had been taken away.
The famine is an organised one. Some of the food that has been taken away from them – and
the peasants know this quite well – is still being exported to foreign countries …
It is difficult to get people who are starving and who know that, whatever happens, they must go
on starving for at least three more months, and probably five, to talk about or take any great
interest in the future. To them, the question of bread, of how to get enough food to keep just
alive to-day and to-morrow, transcends all others.

Hitler on his moderation, Berlin, Thursday, 3 February 1933

“I only ask four years; after that the nation can do what it will with me – crucify me if it likes,”
said Hitler during an interview which he gave this afternoon to a small group of British and
American journalists.
There was no middle course left for Germany, he said. Either the Bolshevik standard would fly
over Germany or she would recover herself. Appealing for no premature judgment of the press
of the world on his Government, he asked that its deeds should be awaited.
“I have been represented as having made bloodthirsty and firebrand speeches against foreign
countries, and now the world is surprised at my moderation,” he went on. “I never delivered
firebrand speeches against foreign countries – even my speeches of ten years ago can testify
to that. Anyone like myself who knows what war is, is aware of what a squandering of effort, or
rather consumption of strength, is involved.”
As to a possible future war, the result could only be conjectured, and therefore nobody wanted
peace and tranquillity more than himself and Germany. “But like all other nations, we insist
upon equality and our proper place in the world, just as much as the Englishman insists upon
the same thing for his country.”

How the New Government Hides the Truth, from a special correspondent in Germany,
28 March 1933
There is a widespread belief that Germany has been through a period in which some deplorable
but nevertheless natural excesses have been committed – natural in so far as revolutions are
habitually accompanied by a certain effervescence that usually leads to disorder and mob
violence.
Indeed, amongst the supporters of the Hitlerite regime there is a certain pride – pride because
the “revolution” was carried out with so little bloodshed, and the phrase “unbloodiest revolution
in history” has become a favourite catchword.
The Hitlerite victory is not a revolution but a counter-revolution. There have been both
revolutions and counter-revolutions less bloody, and as for the belief that the violence of the last
few weeks has been of the kind natural in a period of excitement, it is necessary to state
categorically that this belief is wholly erroneous. To hold it is wholly to misconceive the
character of the Hitlerite counter-revolution.
The German Government, and more particularly Captain Göring, who, no less than Hitler
himself, is the dictator of Germany, by admitting a few and denying the many excesses …
attempt not only to conceal by far the greater and by far the more terrible part of the truth, but
also to make themselves and their so-called “revolution” appear unique and resplendent by
reason of the kindness and the magnanimity of its leaders, and the prodigious decency and
self-discipline of their followers.
Thus they convert a thing of shame into an object of self-congratulation and boastful pride. This
they are able to do all the more easily because they have the power – there is no press in
Germany, and no news that is not all obsequiousness to the will of the dictatorship can be told;
no truth can be told by the defeated Opposition, and no falsehood told by the Government can
be publicly denied.
This opportunity for spreading untruth and suppressing truth is exploited to the utmost, and with
such success that even in Berlin, the scene of countless horrible outrages, there are many
persons who will assert with entire good faith that nothing unusual has happened, because they
are allowed to see and hear nothing.

Town of Ten Thousand in Ruins, Bilbao, 28 April 1937

Guernica, a town of some 10,000 inhabitants, was yesterday reduced to a mass of burning
ruins by countless numbers of German ‘planes which kept up a continuous bombing for three
and a half hours.
The full story of yesterday’s massacre is not yet known, but what details there are horrible
enough. It is now disclosed that the rebel ‘planes bombed and set fire to isolated farmhouses
for a distance of five miles around Guernica. Even flocks of sheep were machine-gunned.
To-day I visited what remains of the town. I was taken to the entrance of a street like a furnace
which no one had been able to approach since the raid. I was shown a bomb shelter in which
over fifty women and children were trapped and burned alive. Everywhere is a chaos of charred
beams, twisted girders, broken masonry, and smouldering ashes, with forlorn groups of
inhabitants wandering in search of missing relatives.
I picked up one incendiary shell which failed to explode. It was made of aluminium, weighed
nearly two pounds, and was liberally stamped with German eagles.
When I visited the town again this afternoon, it was still burning. Most of the streets in the
centre were impassable, so that it is still unknown how many victims there are. In the ruins, the
fires have been so extensive that many bodies will never be recovered.

'We'd been cowed by the Depression; that's why we

could fight the war'
Guardian readers share their memories, and those of their parents, of life in the
1930s, from tea dances to evacuation and the shock of the Spanish civil war
Marjorie Broad (93)
I was born in 1924, one of 10 children. We lived in Thorne, Yorkshire – then just a village. My
father had a wallpaper shop and decorating business, and pulled his own cart to jobs. He was
successful up until the bad recession of the 1930s when folk could not afford to decorate, and
even local doctors and dentists failed to pay their bills.
Our village school also took pupils from the nearby mining village of Moorends; they often came
to school shoeless, even in winter – difficult to imagine these days. I recall there was a “Poor
Law” official who, if you applied for help, would come to the house and assess your request. But
you’d have had to sell your furniture to raise funds first, only being allowed to retain the beds.
My two oldest brothers left home at 14, travelling south to work for J Sainsbury at various
shops. All the lads lived above the shops with a housekeeper; I remember my brother telling me
that if they dropped and broke a jar of jam, they’d have to pick the bits of glass out, and then the
jam was used on their bread. (A while ago, I wrote to Lord Sainsbury telling him of these
memories, and he wrote back to say he had read out my letter at a family dinner.)
In 1934, having lost his business in the recession, my father moved the rest of the family south
to Edgware in Middlesex. My sisters and I were bullied at school for our strange accents, but
my parents didn’t complain to the school; they just told us to get on with it. In 1938 I passed the
matriculation exam – but my parents wouldn’t allow me to take my rightful place at grammar
school, and insisted I go out and find a job.
I was bitter about this for many years, but as I got older I realised it was the shortage of money
that made their decision for them. There was no assistance in those days and I feel this is
happening again now: children from poorer families aren’t always able to go on to further
education.
My best friend’s father was from Tyneside and was on the Jarrow march in 1936. He and fellow
walkers existed on hand-outs as they passed through towns and villages en route to London. I
believe he was about 55; his feet never recovered and he had difficulty walking for the rest of
his life.
In 1939, we all sat and listened to the prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, ending his address
with the words: “And consequently, this country is now at war with Germany.” At 15, I could not
understand why my mother was crying – to me, it all seemed very exciting.
But the following September, on a Sunday afternoon, our house was demolished by a bomb
from a German plane; my mother and one of my brothers were injured by the broken glass.
Next day, all my work colleagues brought in at least one item of clothing for me from their own
wardrobes. I ended up with more clothes than I’d had before!

Terry Richardson (aged 83)

I remember a wet, windy, wintry day in 1938. My dad, who was engaged in the building trade,
was out of work again. We lived in a council house in Worthing, Sussex; the rent was due but
there was no money to pay it.
My dad had to seek some alternative source of income so, along with many other unemployed
local men, he took to going on the beach in the Worthing area to pick up winkles from the
rockpools that revealed themselves when the tide receded for three hours or so. To get to the
beach, which was about three miles away, my dad had to ride his old bike against the wind and
rain.
When we returned home from school that afternoon, I remember the galvanised bathtub,
previously used for our weekly baths, was half-filled with winkles and cooking over a low gas.
The next day my brother and I sold the cooked winkles around the neighbourhood in packets
made from used newspapers. I don’t remember how much for – or if, indeed, we made the rent
money.

Daisy Bennison (83)

One day, I remember Mum coming home from the welfare office – we could see how upset she
was. We were told a welfare officer would be coming to assess our needs. In those days they
could tell you to sell household items if they thought they were not essential.
The only non-essential furniture in our house was Mum’s piano. One night, the piano was
wheeled to my aunt’s house, which was in the next street to us. Aunt Mary said she would keep
it there until after the welfare person had been – so at least Mum would be able to keep her
beloved piano.

Marion Monahan (88)

The housing conditions in central Scotland where I grew up were dire. The outside toilet we
shared with a dozen or so families was frozen for most of the winter. My father had a job as a
fitter in a brewery, but we were still five in one bedroom – I was 14, my brother 13 and my sister
seven before we had enough points to be rented a two-bedroom council flat, in 1942.
I only weighed six stone by the time I went up to St Andrews University. My father grew us
vegetables and fruit in a railway allotment, but I remember always being hungry as a child. I
used to visit my maternal grandmother after school a lot, because she’d always tell my aunt to
“gie the bairn a jeelie piece”. I would wolf down that bread and jam in seconds.
Life in the slums changed dramatically in 1939. The young men went off to war and some never
returned. But now there was no unemployment, and married women got jobs. Young women
joined the services or made munitions, while school children worked in their holidays picking
potatoes or in shops and offices. Food rationing and home economics on the radio meant our
diet improved immensely; fresh fish from Aberdeen came into the station every morning to
supplement the meat ration.

Anne Gambrell
At the start of the 1930s, my father’s family was living in slum squalor in Tooley Street, by
London Bridge. He lived in one room with his parents and twin sisters. A younger set of twins
had died when he was two – a fact he didn’t discover until my nan died in 1978. The eldest
sister was sent to live with her grandparents in Kent, to relieve pressure on the family.
Grandad was a daily-paid docker, turning up at the docks first thing every morning in the hope
of securing work. I used to think that sounded shocking. Today, we call it a zero-hours contract.
He was active in the union, and I have a photo of him, his brother, their father and my aunts
carrying the Transport and General Workers’ Union banner at a rally. No idea where that came
from, they had no spare money.
Grandad grew his own veg in the garden at home; by the time war started, he had also buried
several years’ supply of illicit gin in earthenware jars under the potato patch. The phrase “I’m
going to dig up some tatties” was neighbourhood code for “party at ours”.
All was good until the V1 and V2 rockets arrived, and debris from one landed in the front hedge.
“Good job it didn’t land out the back,” Grandad told me years later (he lived to be 95). “If it had
hit the potato patch, the ’ole street would have gorn orf!”
The tenancy of the house my grandparents moved into in 1931 stayed in the family until my
mother’s death in 2000, by which time it was returned to Merton council. When right-to-buy
came in under Thatcher, I asked Grandad if he was going to buy it, as he could have done so
for a pittance. His reply was prophetic:
“No, because we were given this house when we were in a bind, and a wonderful home it has
been. All these neighbours buying their houses, boasting about how much they will be worth,
concreting over their front gardens, changing doors and windows, they are so greedy. What will
happen when all the houses are sold, and your children have nowhere to go if they are in need,
like Nan and I were? It’s wrong, and I won’t have a part in it.” He could have bought the house
for less than £5,000, and similar properties today are selling for around £400k. My political hero!

RW Johnson
My father, Stanley Marwood Johnson, was brought up near Manchester in an unhappy family;
his father beat him with an iron bar. When he was 18, a final argument saw him thrown out of
the house, ending any hope of going to university.
He played football in the Lancashire Combination League, and once scored 120 goals in a 40-
game season – whereupon he was signed by Liverpool FC in, I think, 1929. He played in their
reserves but was paid only 30 shillings a week and could not manage on that, so had to stop.
Thereafter he picked up whatever job he could – sometimes as a waiter, sometimes as an odd-
job man. Times were desperate and all that mattered was getting any job at all.
As a result of the “Geddes axe”, police salaries were cut and the Birkenhead force went on
strike. All the strikers were dismissed and their jobs readvertised. Feeling extremely guilty about
being a blackleg, my father and a host of others applied. He was picked but found the
atmosphere dreadful.
Eventually, he left to become a shipyard worker at Cammell Laird, and gradually learnt a good
deal about ships’ engines. By then, he was courting my mother, cycling the 140 miles from
Birkenhead to Gloucester, and the same back, to spend weekends with her.
In August 1939, he found himself looking around the Bristol docks when a ship’s captain invited
him aboard, then mentioned he needed to recruit a few engineers. My father naively thought
this a wonderful opening, and was recruited on the spot. He was in the mid-Atlantic when war
was declared.
Years later, I got him to talk about his experiences of the war (he seldom did). He described the
tremendous tension in the Liverpool Port Office as men waited for the clerk of the port to pin on
the noticeboard the names of the ships for the Atlantic convoy and the Murmansk convoy. On
the former, losses averaged one in three, on the latter one in two, so everyone dreaded
Murmansk – a trip my father made four times.
I said: “Dad, I would have refused. You were a family man with three young kids, being asked to
play Russian roulette for years on end. I’d have told them: ‘Give me a gun and I’ll go and fight,
but this is inhuman.’”
My mother interjected that they had all been too patriotic to think like that. But my father said
no, the men in that port office were not patriotic; they were a tough and cynical lot. Later, he’d
often asked himself why none of them had refused. The reason, he said, was they’d all learnt
bitterly that you should never, ever refuse a job – because your card would get marked by the
bosses, and you would never work again.
My father told me: “Every one of us there had been intimidated and cowed by the reality or the
fear of long-term unemployment. The fact is, you couldn’t have fought that war if people hadn’t
all first been cowed by the Depression in the 1930s.”
Nora Boswell
My parents were not from wealthy families, but they were well educated. In later life they
recalled that, growing up, they considered the poor and lower-working classes were utterly
different from them – practically a different species.
Aged 24, my mother went to see the Jarrow marchers at Covent Garden. When she saw
students throwing cabbages at them, she laughed. Years later, she told me she had never
ceased to feel guilty for that laugh. It was, I think, a moment that began a change in her view of
others.

Ian Cawood
My mother was forced to leave school in Leeds in the 1930s to go out to work at 14. Two
stories she told me about that time have stuck with me.
The first is that Leeds city council had a charitable scheme called “boots for the bairns”, which
gave stout shoes to children to enable them to walk to school. She remembers about a third of
her schoolmates in Armley wearing such shoes and being subject to ridicule, as they were a
sign of poverty in an age when poverty was still a sign of personal and moral failing.
The second was when, in her final year of school, she spoke out in a discussion on the Nazis’
treatment of the Jews, in which it was fairly clear that most of the teachers heartily approved of
Hitler’s actions. Having argued that it was morally wrong to mistreat innocent people because of
the perceived faults of others, she overheard the teachers as she left saying: “I never knew
Joyce Pinkney was Jewish. She always looks so clean.”
My mother was an Anglican, but such was the low-level, middle-class antisemitism of the age, it
was assumed that anyone who opposed Hitler must be Jewish. This is the world we are
speedily returning to: hatred of all foreigners and ridicule of the poor. I am only glad that my
mother is no longer alive to see it.

Tony Griffiths (aged 85)

I can never remember hearing anything about the economic troubles of the 30s. What a
charmed and wonderful childhood I had in north Shropshire: fresh vegetables straight from my
dad’s garden. “Go outside and dig up some potatoes for supper,” my mother would say – and,
boy, did they taste good. Nothing like the supermarket stuff we eat these days.
But the best of all was Market Drayton baths. Yes, we had a public swimming pool, unheated
and murky at first – but still going strong today. Miss Onions left £500 in her will to build the
pool. She did not like the idea of the locals bathing in the River Tern and changing behind
bushes – anything could be going on!
Rain or shine, we lived down at the baths, under the watchful eye of Mr Bickley, the
superintendent. First in was best: we’d get up early and throw pebbles at Mr Bickley’s bedroom
window until he woke up and threw out the keys. Then it was into the baths pell mell, change,
along the springboard, a big bounce and then, for a brief moment, see your arching body
reflected in the still cold water. Ah, the wonderful biting cold – I can still feel it!
Diving to the bottom, fishing in the muddy murk for pennies thrown in by the Yanks. Days of joy,
days of innocence. Wonderful.

Sandra
As with so many other people, there was a lot of sadness in my parents’ families in the 1930s.
My mother’s family lived in the East End of London. Her parents were deaf and mute; my mum
was the youngest of four siblings and all were hearing children.
Life was very tough, work was difficult to get – especially if you had no hearing and could not
speak. Mum’s father used to have to climb up inside the factory chimneys to clean them. Many
a time the local children used to chase my mother, shouting: “Let’s get Dummy’s kid.” It was a
great stigma in those days.

Laura Waugh (96)

My mother, Laura, who is registered blind, was born in 1920, the youngest of six girls, and grew
up in Birkenhead. When she became 14, her parents could not afford to pay for her to continue
in school/training, as they had done for four of her sisters, so she went to work instead. Her
other sister stayed at home – it was common for one sister to stay and help in the house.
In the previous decade, there had been queues along the street when vacancies were
advertised, but from 1935 to 1939, Mum had no difficulty finding work, latterly in a shipping
office. There was no training, she had to learn on the job.
In her free time she went to tea dances, ballroom dancing, and did lots of walking (there were
very few cars around, but lots of bikes). She and her friends listened to the radio a lot – Radio
Luxembourg started in 1933: “We shouldn’t have listened really!”
She particularly remembers the building and opening – by George V in 1934 – of the
Queensway tunnel under the Mersey. It had been dug by hand; there was little protection for
the builders, and many died.
The king and queen went through in a car, then Mum and her family walked through (as I did,
through the Kingsway tunnel, decades later). But her mother was terrified, convinced she would
drown, and wouldn’t go back through – so they had to get the boat back.
Mum says she was only aware of Edward and Mrs Simpson through the newspapers, and was
very sad when he abdicated. She hated Mrs Simpson because she thought she had inveigled
Edward, as he was very weak. George (his brother and successor) was nice enough, but “we
knew he didn’t want to be king”.

Melissa Roy
My mother grew up during the Depression on a small family farm on a small family farm in
Macon County, Missouri – in a place called Tullvania, which no longer exists. Her mother
became an expert at patching holes in shoes since they were too poor to buy new, but if the
weather was not too cold the children mostly went barefoot. My mother and uncle attended a
school around five miles away and travelled by horseback – riding on one horse.
My father grew up in the inner city, one of eight children. Like his brothers, he left school early
and did manual labour to supplement the family income when my grandfather’s small business
went belly-up and he fell into poor health. According to my grandmother, the family was
sustained for a time on a daily giant pot of boiled beans.
Despite these hardships, family and community bonds were exceptionally strong. My maternal
grandfather told me about “penny auctions” that took place in the 1930s. Farmers from all over
the area attended these public auctions to make sure the bidding was kept low enough for them
to buy the foreclosed property and hand it back to the original owners. Sticking it to the banks
was a bonus …

Lawrence Renaudon Smith

My grandfather was the general manager of the largest wholesale fruiterers in Stoke-on-Trent in
the 1930s. One evening in 1936, he returned home from work very upset. At dinner, he told the
family, which included my mother (15 at the time) that when he had made his regular telephone
call to their tomato suppliers in Almeria, Spain, to make the order, instead of the usual person
answering, someone had spoken in Spanish and after some delay, another person spoke to
him in very broken English.
This person explained that a civil war had just started, and the owner of the business, who
usually spoke with my grandfather, had been on one side and some other family members on
the other side had killed him. Whatever was going to happen, he was told, no tomatoes would
be shipped to Britain for a long time.
My grandfather did not know much about foreign politics and was in a state of shock. Even
though he had fought in the first world war, he couldn’t imagine a civil war where members of
the same family were on different sides and were killing each other. He was absolutely horrified.

Deborah Murray
Born in 1937, my mother was the youngest of five girls living with her widowed mother in a two-
up, two-down house in Merthyr Tydfil. They had one outside (cold) tap, a bath on the back of
the door (which they used once a week), an outside privy and absolutely no money.
She says she once stood behind a mother and daughter in a local shop, and they bought a
cardigan for the child. My mother said: “Why are they buying a cardigan, Mam? She already
has one on.”

Ruth Morley (83)

My parents’ marriage was short – my father died in 1942 – and I don’t think particularly happy.
He worked as a fitter in the shipyards in Wallsend on Tyne; we used to walk down to take him
his lunch. We’d stand at the big gates, and he and the other men would come and get the food
from their wives. Their hours were long and I saw very little of him.
The first sign of the war was when my father dug a big hole in our back garden and installed an
Anderson shelter; a metal arch with a wooden door. He covered the shelter with dirt and grew
flowers on the top. I don’t remember us ever using it as a shelter, but I do recall it was
frequently full of water – so it would have been a bit tricky to use.
Then came evacuation. We took the electric train into Newcastle and walked in a crocodile to
platform 8. The day is still very vivid, but I don’t recall being upset or scared.
Another train took us to Brampton Junction, a few miles from Newcastle. On the train we were
given a brown paper bag in which there was a bun, three “ring-a-ring-a roses” books and some
pieces of cloth to sew. Presumably the boys got something different.
When we arrived, we were taken to the church hall. Lots of people chose children to take away;
I was one of the last and was quite bothered as to why I was not being picked. An elderly
couple eventually took me and a girl called Pat. We went in a car to their house: a lovely
bungalow up on the hill above a place called How Mill.
Pat only stayed briefly and then, like many evacuees, went back to the city. People were really
worried about their children, and many children were terrified, too. Later, I heard horror stories
of what happened with some of them. I was lucky.
My mother had also been evacuated with the twins – but my father, of course, stayed working in
Wallsend. He developed a duodenal ulcer but because there was the possibility of lots of troops
needing beds, he was sent home from hospital. Maybe it was Dunkirk, I don’t know. Then his
ulcer burst, and he died – there were no antibiotics then. How we take them for granted now.

David Fryer
My mother was born in the early 30s and before she died, wrote a memoir of her early
memories living in Grantham in Lincolnshire – from which the following is an extract. At the
time, she lived with her grandparents, Bill and Lizzie, and her mother, Nora …
Life became very hard during the Depression in the 30s, and Bill was out of work for 16 years.
Lizzie was a trained Red Cross nurse and did various jobs, including “laying out the dead”.
Washing and ironing were another source of income; she worked very hard washing for the
officers at nearby RAF Spitalgate and tablecloths from the mess. The officers were very
particular about their shirts: the collars had to be starched and the fronts had to be without the
slightest sign of a crease.
The house was a three-bedroom end-of-terrace, considered rather spacious. There was no
bathroom, so a large tin bath was kept in a cupboard. A bath was taken on a Friday or Saturday
night in the living room, in front of the fire.
Grandma and Grandad had a wireless powered by an accumulator (like a car battery). It was
filled with acid and charged every week. An aerial ran from the back of the wireless through a
hole in the window frame up to the roof. News programmes were always listened to, and even
in those days quiz shows were always popular. The adults would be up no later than 9.30pm,
usually retiring after the nine o’clock news.
Sunday dinner was always a bit special; we all enjoyed a roast dinner, mainly spare rib of beef
or half a leg of lamb. A Yorkshire pudding cooked in a large baking tin, lots of potatoes with
seasonal vegetables and a rich gravy. During cooking, the fat would be used to baste the meat,
and afterwards the fat would be strained into a basin and used as dripping. Beef or pork
dripping was delicious on toasted bread.
When money was short, Grandma Lizzie would make a vegetable stew. She would get meat
bones from the butcher and put them into a large pan with potatoes, carrots, swede, onions,
parsnips, dried peas and butterbeans and cook them slowly. The stew would be thickened with
some flour and maybe an Oxo cube or marmite, added for flavour.
Monday was wash day, which would start around 6am. A large copper container would be filled
with water the previous night, first thing Monday morning a fire was lit underneath it. Dolly tubs
and several tin baths were used for the various stages of the wash – it was very hard work.
After the washing and several rinses, the clothes would be put through a mangle and hung out
in the garden.
Early Tuesday morning, the big iron would begin – on the kitchen table. A blanket was folded
several times and covered with a white sheet. Two or three flat-irons would be placed over a
flame on the gas cooker until they were really hot. After several hours of ironing and many
changes of iron, Grandma Lizzie would stop to get the midday meal ready.

'Like Judgment Day' … How commentators viewed the

Great Depression by Piers Brendon, the author of The Dark Valley: A Panorama of
the 1930s.

The Crash of 1929 was an apocalypse, Northumbrian towns were worse than
those in occupied France and even the Times admitted there was great poverty
The economist John Maynard Keynes suggested the world was entering a new dark age in the
1930s.
Pope Pius XI said that the Great Depression of the 1930s was “the worst calamity that has
befallen man since the Flood”. Such pronouncements might be expected from the Vatican, but
apocalyptic language became commonplace during the “devil’s decade”.
The writer and critic Edmund Wilson likened the crash of the US stock market in 1929 to “a
rending of the Earth in preparation for the Day of Judgment”. The economist John Maynard
Keynes suggested that the world in the grip of the economic blizzard was entering a new dark
age that would last a thousand years. The French premier Léon Blum was one of many who
compared the Depression to Armageddon, declaring that its effects were as traumatic as those
of the first world war. The poet Edwin Muir described the army of unemployed as “the dead on
leave”.
With the collapse of industries that had made Britain the workshop of the world – iron, steel,
coal, textiles, shipbuilding – some parts of the country did appear to have experienced the
ravages of war.
In 1933, JB Priestley found places in Northumberland and Durham that looked worse than
towns he had seen in northern France that had suffered four years of German occupation.
Tyneside was the epitome of dereliction, full of ruined factories, deserted warehouses, rusting
cranes and decomposing ships. In Jarrow, starting point of the most famous of many hunger
marches, 80% of the population lacked jobs and were subject to the tyranny of the means test
and the hopelessness of the dole. The government designated such districts “special areas”
but, wrote the novelist James Hanley, they constituted “a new kind of social hell, with nothing
special about it except the demoralisation of a whole people, physical and moral”.
Yet large sections of the British people came relatively well out of the Depression – so much so,
indeed, that some historians have dismissed the “hungry 30s” as a myth.
It is true that prices fell, while average incomes and living standards rose appreciably.
Prosperity stemmed from the boom in housebuilding and the production and sale of consumer
goods: cars, clothes, furniture, radios, telephones, vacuum cleaners, cigarettes. Clearly visible
in the south and east of England were the beginnings of an affluent society.
Nevertheless, even the Times acknowledged that half the population was “living on a diet
insufficient or ill-designed to maintain health”. In the midst of plenty, their poverty was especially
galling.
Even those in work were haunted by the spectre of unemployment. As the Tottenham-born
playwright Ted Willis wrote: “It was impossible not to sense, and to share, the atmosphere of
fear and foreboding which lay on the district like a frost.”
Such anxieties contributed to a pathological pessimism about the future of civilisation which
characterised what historian Richard Overy subsequently labelled “the morbid age”.