Title: The Road to Wigan Pier
Author: George Orwell
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Language:   English
Date first posted: June 2002
Date most recently updated: June 2002

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Title:      The Road to Wigan Pier
Author:     George Orwell




PART ONE

  1

The first sound in the mornings was the clumping of the mill-girls' clogs
down the cobbled street. Earlier than that, I suppose, there were factory
whistles which I was never awake to hear.

My bed was in the right-hand corner on the side nearest the door.
There was another bed across the foot of it and jammed hard against it (it
had to be in that position to allow the door to open) so that I had to
sleep with my legs doubled up; if I straightened them out I kicked the
occupant of the other bed in the small of the back. He was an elderly man
named Mr Reilly, a mechanic of sorts and employed 'on top' at one of the
coal pits. Luckily he had to go to work at five in the morning, so I could
uncoil my legs and have a couple of hours' proper sleep after he was gone.
In the bed opposite there was a Scotch miner who had been injured in a pit
accident (a huge chunk of stone pinned him to the ground and it was a
couple of hours before they could lever it off), and had received five
hundred pounds compensation. He was a big handsome man of forty, with
grizzled hair and a clipped moustache, more like a sergeant-major than a
miner, and he would lie in bed till late in the day, smoking a short pipe.
The other bed was occupied by a succession of commercial travellers,
newspaper-canvassers, and hire-purchase touts who generally stayed for a
couple of nights. It was a double bed and much the best in the room. I had
slept in it myself my first night there, but had been manoeuvred out of it
to make room for another lodger. I believe all newcomers spent their first
night in the double bed, which was used, so to speak, as bait. All the
windows were kept tight shut, with a red sandbag jammed in the bottom, and
in the morning the room stank like a ferret's cage. You did not notice it
when you got up, but if you went out of the room and came back, the smell
hit you in the face with a smack.

I never discovered how many bedrooms the house contained, but strange
to say there was a bathroom, dating from before the Brookers' time.
Downstairs there was the usual kitchen living-room with its huge open range
burning night and day. It was lighted only by a skylight, for on one side
of it was the shop and on the other the larder, which opened into some dark
subterranean place where the tripe was stored. Partly blocking the door of
the larder there was a shapeless sofa upon which Mrs Brooker, our landlady,
lay permanently ill, festooned in grimy blankets. She had a big, pale
yellow, anxious face. No one knew for certain what was the matter with her;
I suspect that her only real trouble was over-eating. In front of the fire
there was almost always a line of damp washing, and in the middle of the
room was the big kitchen table at which the family and all the lodgers ate.
I never saw this table completely uncovered, but I saw its various
wrappings at different times. At the bottom there was a layer of old
newspaper stained by Worcester Sauce; above that a sheet of sticky white
oil-cloth; above that a green serge cloth; above that a coarse linen cloth,
never changed and seldom taken off. Generally the crumbs from breakfast
were still on the table at supper. I used to get to know individual crumbs
by sight and watch their progress up and down the table from day to day.

The shop was a narrow, cold sort of room. On the. outside of the
window a few white letters, relics of ancient chocolate advertisements,
were scattered like stars. Inside there was a slab upon which lay the great
white folds of tripe, and the grey flocculent stuff known as 'black tripe',
and the ghostly translucent feet of pigs, ready boiled. It was the ordinary
'tripe and pea' shop, and not much else was stocked except bread,
cigarettes, and tinned stuff. 'Teas' were advertised in the window, but if
a customer demanded a cup of tea he was usually put off with excuses. Mr
Brooker, though out of work for two years, was a miner by trade, but he and
his wife had been keeping shops of various kinds as a side-line all their
lives. At one time they had had a pub, but they had lost their licence for
allowing gambling on the premises. I doubt whether any of their businesses
had ever paid; they were the kind of people who run a business chiefly in
order to have something to grumble about. Mr Brooker was a dark, small-
boned, sour, Irish-looking man, and astonishingly dirty. I don't think I
ever once saw his hands clean. As Mrs Brooker was now an invalid he
prepared most of the food, and like all people with permanently dirty hands
he had a peculiarly intimate, lingering manner of handling things. If he
gave you a slice of bread-and-butter there was always a black thumb-print
on it. Even in the early morning when he descended into the mysterious den
behind Mrs Brooker's sofa and fished out the tripe, his hands were already
black. I heard dreadful stories from the other lodgers about the place
where the tripe was kept. Blackbeetles were said to swarm there. I do not
know how often fresh consignments of tripe were ordered, but it was at long
intervals, for Mrs Brooker used to date events by it. 'Let me see now, I've
had in three lots of froze (frozen tripe) since that happened,' etc. We
lodgers were never given tripe to eat. At the time I imagined that this
was because tripe was too expensive; I have since thought that it was
merely because we knew too much about it. The Brookers never ate tripe
themselves, I noticed.

The only permanent lodgers were the Scotch miner, Mr Reilly, two old-
age pensioners, and an unemployed man on the P.A.C. named Joe--he was the
kind of person who has no surname. The Scotch miner was a bore when you got
to know him. Like so many unemployed men he spent too much time reading
newspapers, and if you did not head him off he would discourse for hours
about such things as the Yellow Peril, trunk murders, astrology, and the
conflict between religion and science. The old-age pensioners had, as
usual, been driven from their homes by the Means Test. They handed their
weekly ten shillings over to the Brookers and in return got the kind of
accommodation you would expect for ten shillings; that is, a bed in the
attic and meals chiefly of bread-and-butter. One of them was of'superior'
type and was dying of some malignant disease--cancer, I believe. He only
got out of bed on the days when he went to draw his pension. The other,
called by everyone Old Jack, was an ex-miner aged seventy-eight who had
worked well over fifty years in the pits. He was alert and intelligent, but
curiously enough he seemed only to remember his boyhood experiences and to
have forgotten all about the modem mining machinery and improvements. He
used to tell me tales of fights with savage horses in the narrow galleries
underground. When he heard that I was arranging to go down several coal
mines he was contemptuous and declared that a man of my size (six feet two
and a half) would never manage the 'travelling'; it was no use telling him
that the 'travelling' was better than it used to be. But he was friendly to
everyone and used to give us all a fine shout of 'Good night, boys!' as he
crawled up the stairs to his bed somewhere under the rafters. What I most
admired about Old Jack was that he never cadged; he was generally out-of
tobacco towards the end of the week, but he always refused to smoke anyone
else's. The Brookers had insured the lives of both old-age pensioners with
one of the tanner-a-week companies. It was said that they were overheard
anxiously asking the insurance-tout 'how long people lives when they've got
cancer'.

Joe, like the Scotchman, was a great reader of newspapers and spent
almost his entire day in the public library. He was the typical unmarried
unemployed man, a derelict-looking, frankly ragged creature with a round,
almost childish face on which there was a naively naughty expression. He
looked more like a neglected little boy than a grown-up man. I suppose it
is the complete lack of responsibility that makes so many of these men look
younger than their ages. From Joe's appearance I took him to be about
twenty-eight, and was amazed to learn that he was forty-three. He had a
love of resounding phrases and was very proud of the astuteness with which
he had avoided getting married. He often said to me, 'Matrimonial chains is
a big item,' evidently feeling this to be a very subtle and portentous
remark. His total income was fifteen shillings a week, and he paid out six
or seven to the Brookers for his bed. I sometimes used to see him making
himself a cup of tea over the kitchen fire, but for the rest he got his
meals somewhere out of doors; it was mostly slices of bread-and-marg and
packets of fish and chips, I suppose.

Besides these there was a floating clientele of commercial travellers
of the poorer sort, travelling actors--always common in the North because
most of the larger pubs hire variety artists at the week-ends--and
newspaper-canvassers. The newspaper-canvassers were a type I had never met
before. Their job seemed to me so hopeless, so appalling that I wondered
how anyone could put up with such a thing when prison was a possible
alternative. They were employed mostly by weekly or Sunday papers, and they
were sent from town to town, provided with maps and given a list of streets
which they had to 'work' each day. If they failed to secure a minimum of
twenty orders a day, they got the sack. So long as they kept up their
twenty orders a day they received a small salary--two pounds a week, I
think; on any order over the twenty they drew a tiny commission. The thing
is not so impossible as it sounds, because in working-class districts every
family takes in a twopenny weekly paper and changes it every few weeks; but
I doubt whether anyone keeps a job of that kind long. The newspapers engage
poor desperate wretches, out-of-work clerks and commercial travellers and
the like, who for a while make frantic efforts and keep their sales up to
the minimum; then as the deadly work wears them down they are sacked and
fresh men are taken on. I got to know two who were employed by one of the
more notorious weeklies. Both of them were middle-aged men with families to
support, and one of them was a grandfather. They were on their feet ten
hours a day, 'working' their appointed streets, and then busy late into the
night filling in blank forms for some swindle their paper was running--
one of those schemes by which you are 'given' a set of crockery if you take
out a six weeks' subscription and send a two-shilling postal order as well.
The fat one, the grandfather, used to fall asleep with his head on a pile
of forms. Neither of them could afford the pound a week which the Brookers
charged for full board. They used to pay a small sum for their beds and
make shamefaced meals in a corner of the kitchen off bacon and bread-and-
margarine which they stored in their suit-cases.

The Brookers had large numbers of sons and daughters, most of whom had
long since fled from home. Some were in Canada 'at Canada', as Mrs Brooker
used to put it. There was only one son living near by, a large pig-like
young man employed in a garage, who frequently came to the house for his
meals. His wife was there all day with the two children, and most of the
cooking and laundering was done by her and by Emmie, the fiancee of another
son who was in London. Emmie was a fair-haired, sharp-nosed, unhappy-
looking girl who worked at one of the mills for some starvation wage, but
nevertheless spent all her evenings in bondage at the Brookers' house. I
gathered that the marriage was constantly being postponed and would
probably never take place, but Mrs Brooker had already appropriated Emmie
as a daughter-in-law, and nagged her in that peculiar watchful, loving way
that invalids have. The rest of the housework was done, or not done, by Mr
Brooker. Mrs Brooker seldom rose from her sofa in the kitchen (she spent
the night there as well as the day) and was too ill to do anything except
eat stupendous meals. It was Mr Brooker who attended to the shop, gave the
lodgers their food, and 'did out' the bedrooms. He was always moving with
incredible slowness from one hated job to another. Often the beds were
still unmade at six in the evening, and at any hour of the day you were
liable to meet Mr Brooker on the stairs, carrying a full chamber-pot which
he gripped with his thumb well over the rim. In the mornings he sat by the
fire with a tub of filthy water, peeling potatoes at the speed of a slow-
motion picture. I never saw anyone who could peel potatoes with quite such
an air of brooding resentment. You could see the hatred of this 'bloody
woman's work', as he called it, fermenting inside him, a kind of bitter
juice. He was one of those people who can chew their grievances like a cud.

Of course, as I was indoors a good deal, I heard all about the
Brookers' woes, and how everyone swindled them and was ungrateful to them,
and how the shop did not pay and the lodging-house hardly paid. By local
standards they were not so badly off, for, in some way I did not
understand, Mr Brooker was dodging the Means Test and drawing an allowance
from the P.A.C., but their chief pleasure was talking about their
grievances to anyone who would listen. Mrs Brooker used to lament by the
hour, lying on her sofa, a soft mound of fat and self-pity, saying the same
things over and over again.' We don't seem to get no customers nowadays. I
don't know 'ow it is. The tripe's just a-laying there day after day--such
beautiful tripe it is, too! It does seem 'ard, don't it now ?' etc., etc.,
etc. All Mrs Brookers' laments ended with' It does seem 'ard, don't it now?'
like the refrain of a ballade. Certainly it was true that the shop did
not pay. The whole place had the unmistakable dusty, flyblown air of a
business that is going down. But it would have been quite useless to
explain to them why nobody came to the shop, even if one had had the face
to do it; neither was capable of understanding that last year's dead
bluebottles supine in the shop window are not good for trade.

But the thing that really tormented them was the thought of those two
old-age pensioners living in their house, usurping floor-space, devouring
food, and paying only ten shillings a week. I doubt whether they were
really losing money over the old-age pensioners, though certainly the
profit on ten shillings a week must have been very small. But in their eyes
the two old men were a kind of dreadful parasite who had fastened on them
and were living on their charity. Old Jack they could just tolerate,
because he kept out-of-doors most of the day, but they really hated the
bedridden one, Hooker by name. Mr Brooker had a queer way of pronouncing
his name, without the H and with a long U--'Uker'. What tales I heard
about old Hooker and his fractiousness, the nuisance of making his bed, the
way he 'wouldn't eat' this and 'wouldn't eat' that, his endless ingratitude
and, above all, the selfish obstinacy with which he refused to die! The
Brookers were quite openly pining for him to die. When that happened they
could at least draw the insurance money. They seemed to feel him there,
eating their substance day after day, as though he had been a living worm
in their bowels. Sometimes Mr Brooker would look up from his potato-
peeling, catch my eye, and jerk his head with a look of inexpressible
bitterness towards the ceiling, towards old Hooker's room. 'It's a b-,
ain't it?' he would say. There was no need to say more; I had heard all
about old Hooker's ways already. But the Brookers had grievances of one
kind and another against all their lodgers, myself included, no doubt. Joe,
being on the P.A.C., was practically in the same category as the old-age
pensioners. The Scotchman paid a pound a week, but he was indoors most of
the day and they 'didn't like him always hanging round the place', as they
put it. The newspaper-canvassers were out all day, but the Brookers bore
them a grudge for bringing in their own food, and even Mr Reilly, their
best lodger, was in disgrace because Mrs Brooker said that he woke her up
when he came downstairs in the mornings. They couldn't, they complained
perpetually, get the kind of lodgers they wanted--good-class 'commercial
gentlemen' who paid full board and were out all day. Their ideal lodger
would have been somebody who paid thirty shillings a week and never came
indoors except to sleep. I have noticed that people who let lodgings nearly
always hate their lodgers. They want their money but they look on them as
intruders and have a curiously watchful, jealous attitude which at bottom
is a determination not to let the lodger make himself too much at home. It
is an inevitable result of the bad system by which the lodger has to live
in somebody else's house without being one of the family.

The meals at the Brookers' house were uniformly disgusting. For
breakfast you got two rashers of bacon and a pale fried egg, and bread-and-
butter which had often been cut overnight and always had thumb-marks on it.
However tactfully I tried, I could never induce Mr Brooker to let me cut my
own bread-and-butter; he would hand it to me slice by slice, each slice
gripped firmly under that broad black thumbs For dinner there were
generally those threepenny steak puddings which are sold ready-made in
tins--these were part of the stock of the shop, I think--and boiled
potatoes and rice pudding. For tea there was more bread-and-butter and
frayed-looking sweet cakes which were probably bought as 'stales' from the
baker. For supper there was the pale flabby Lancashire cheese and biscuits.
The Brookers never called these biscuits biscuits. They always referred to
them reverently as 'cream crackers'--'Have another cream cracker, Mr Reilly.
You'll like a cream cracker with your cheese'--thus glozing over the fact
that there was only cheese for supper. Several bottles of Worcester Sauce
and a half-full jar of marmalade lived permanently on the table. It was
usual to souse everything, even a piece of cheese, with Worcester Sauce,
but I never saw anyone brave the marmalade jar, which was an unspeakable
mass of stickiness and dust. Mrs Brooker had her meals separately but also
took snacks from any meal that happened to be going, and manoeuvred with
great skill for what she called 'the bottom of the pot', meaning the
strongest cup of tea. She had a habit of constantly wiping her mouth on one
of her blankets. Towards the end of my stay she took to tearing off strips
of newspaper for this purpose, and in the morning the floor was often
littered with crumpled-up balls of slimy paper which lay there for hours.
The smell of the kitchen was dreadful, but, as with that of the bedroom,
you ceased to notice it after a while.

It struck me that this place must be fairly normal as lodging-houses
in the industrial areas go, for on the whole the lodgers did not complain.
The only one who ever did so to my knowledge was a little black-haired,
sharp-nosed Cockney, a traveller for a cigarette firm. He had never been in
the North before, and I think that till recently he had been in better
employ and was used to staying in commercial hotels. This was his first
glimpse of really low-class lodgings, the kind of place in which the poor
tribe of touts and canvassers have to shelter upon their endless journeys.
In the morning as we were dressing (he had slept in the double bed, of
course) I saw him look round the desolate room with a sort of wondering
aversion. He caught my eye and suddenly divined that I was a fellow-
Southerner. 'The filthy bloody bastards!' he said feelingly. After that he
packed his suit-case, went downstairs and, with great strength of mind,
told the Brookers that this was not the kind of house he was accustomed to
and that he was leaving immediately. The Brookers could never understand
why. They were astonished and hurt. The ingratitude of it! Leaving them
like that for no reason after a single night! Afterwards they discussed it
over and over again, in all its bearings. It was added to their store of
grievances.

On the day when there was a full chamber-pot under the breakfast table
I decided to leave. The place was beginning to depress me. It was not only
the dirt, the smells, and the vile food, but the feeling of stagnant
meaningless decay, of having got down into some subterranean place where
people go creeping round and round, just like blackbeetles, in an endless
muddle of slovened jobs and mean grievances. The most dreadful thing about
people like the Brookers is the way they say the same things over and over
again. It gives you the feeling that they are not real people at all, but a
kind of ghost for ever rehearsing the same futile rigmarole. In the end Mrs
Brooker's self-pitying talk--always the same complaints, over and over,
and always ending with the tremulous whine of 'It does seem 'ard, don't it
now?'--revolted me even more than her habit of wiping her mouth with bits
of newspaper. But it is no use saying that people like the Brookers are
just disgusting and trying to put them out of mind. For they exist in tens
and hundreds of thousands; they are one of the characteristic by-products
of the modern world. You cannot disregard them if you accept the
civilization that produced them. For this is part at least of what
industrialism has done for us. Columbus sailed the Atlantic, the first
steam engines tottered into motion, the British squares stood firm under
the French guns at Waterloo, the one-eyed scoundrels of the nineteenth
century praised God and filled their pockets; and this is where it all led
--to labyrinthine slums and dark back kitchens with sickly, ageing people
creeping round and round them like blackbeetles. It is a kind of duty to
see and smell such places now and again, especially smell them, lest you
should forget that they exist; though perhaps it is better not to stay
there too long.

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

But quite soon the train drew away into open country, and that seemed
strange, almost unnatural, as though the open country had been a kind of
park; for in the industrial areas one always feels that the smoke and filth
must go on for ever and that no part of the earth's surface can escape
them. In a crowded, dirty little country like ours one takes defilement
almost for granted. Slag-heaps and chimneys seem a more normal, probable
landscape than grass and trees, and even in the depths of the country when
you drive your fork into the ground you half expect to lever up a broken
bottle or a rusty can. But out here the snow was untrodden and lay so deep
that only the tops of the stone boundary-walls were showing, winding over
the hills like black paths. I remembered that D. H. Lawrence, writing of
this same landscape or another near by, said that the snow-covered hills
rippled away into the distance 'like muscle'. It was not the simile that
would have occurred to me. To my eye the snow and the black walls were more
like a white dress with black piping running across it.

Although the snow was hardly broken the sun was shining brightly, and
behind the shut windows of the carriage it seemed warm. According to the
almanac this was spring, and a few of the birds seemed to believe it. For
the first time in my life, in a bare patch beside the line, I saw rooks
treading. They did it on the ground and not, as I should have expected, in
a tree. The manner of courtship was curious. The female stood with her beak
open and the male walked round her and appeared to be feeding her. I had
hardly been in the train half an hour, but it seemed a very long way from
the Brookers' back-kitchen to the empty slopes of snow, the bright
sunshine, and the big gleaming birds.

The whole of the industrial districts are really one enormous town, of
about the same population as Greater London but, fortunately, of much
larger area; so that even in the middle of them there is still room for
patches of cleanness and decency. That is an encouraging thought. In spite
of hard trying, man has not yet succeeded in doing his dirt everywhere. The
earth is so vast and still so empty that even in the filthy heart of
civilization you find fields where the grass is green instead of grey;
perhaps if you looked for them you might even find streams with live fish
in them instead of salmon tins. For quite a long time, perhaps another
twenty minutes, the train was rolling through open country before the
villa-civilization began to close in upon us again, and then the outer
slums, and then the slag-heaps, belching chimneys, blast-furnaces, canals,
and gaso-meters of another industrial town.




  2



Our civilization, pace Chesterton, is founded on coal, more completely than
one realizes until one stops to think about it. The machines that keep us
alive, and the machines that make machines, are all directly or indirectly
dependent upon coal. In the metabolism of the Western world the coal-miner
is second in importance only to the man who ploughs the soil. He is a sort
of caryatid upon whose shoulders nearly everything that is not grimy is
supported. For this reason the actual process by which coal is extracted is
well worth watching, if you get the chance and are willing to take the
trouble.

When you go down a coal-mine it is important to try and get to the
coal face when the 'fillers' are at work. This is not easy, because when
the mine is working visitors are a nuisance and are not encouraged, but if
you go at any other time, it is possible to come away with a totally wrong
impression. On a Sunday, for instance, a mine seems almost peaceful. The
time to go there is when the machines are roaring and the air is black with
coal dust, and when you can actually see what the miners have to do. At
those times the place is like hell, or at any rate like my own mental
picture of hell. Most of the things one imagines in hell are if there--
heat, noise, confusion, darkness, foul air, and, above all, unbearably
cramped space. Everything except the fire, for there is no fire down there
except the feeble beams of Davy lamps and electric torches which scarcely
penetrate the clouds of coal dust.

When you have finally got there--and getting there is a in itself: I
will explain that in a moment--you crawl through the last line of pit
props and see opposite you a shiny black wall three or four feet high. This
is the coal face. Overhead is the smooth ceiling made by the rock from
which the coal has been cut; underneath is the rock again, so that the
gallery you are in is only as high as the ledge of coal itself, probably
not much more than a yard. The first impression of all, overmastering
everything else for a while, is the frightful, deafening din from the
conveyor belt which carries the coal away. You cannot see very far, because
the fog of coal dust throws back the beam of your lamp, but you can see on
either side of you the line of half-naked kneeling men, one to every four
or five yards, driving their shovels under the fallen coal and flinging it
swiftly over their left shoulders. They are feeding it on to the conveyor
belt, a moving rubber, belt a couple of feet wide which runs a yard or two
behind them. Down this belt a glittering river of coal races constantly. In
a big mine it is carrying away several tons of coal every minute. It bears
it off to some place in the main roads where it is shot into tubs holding
half a tun, and thence dragged to the cages and hoisted to the outer air.

It is impossible to watch the 'fillers' at work without feelling a
pang of envy for their toughness. It is a dreadful job that they do, an
almost superhuman job by the standard of an ordinary person. For they are
not only shifting monstrous quantities of coal, they are also doing, it in
a position that doubles or trebles the work. They have got to remain
kneeling all the while--they could hardly rise from their knees without
hitting the ceiling--and you can easily see by trying it what a
tremendous effort this means. Shovelling is comparatively easy when you are
standing up, because you can use your knee and thigh to drive the shovel
along; kneeling down, the whole of the strain is thrown upon your arm and
belly muscles. And the other conditions do not exactly make things easier.
There is the heat--it varies, but in some mines it is suffocating--and
the coal dust that stuffs up your throat and nostrils and collects along
your eyelids, and the unending rattle of the conveyor belt, which in that
confined space is rather like the rattle of a machine gun. But the fillers
look and work as though they were made of iron. They really do look like
iron hammered iron statues--under the smooth coat of coal dust which
clings to them from head to foot. It is only when you see miners down the
mine and naked that you realize what splendid men, they are. Most of them
are small (big men are at a disadvantage in that job) but nearly all of
them have the most noble bodies; wide shoulders tapering to slender supple
waists, and small pronounced buttocks and sinewy thighs, with not an ounce
of waste flesh anywhere. In the hotter mines they wear only a pair of thin
drawers, clogs and knee-pads; in the hottest mines of all, only the clogs
and knee-pads. You can hardly tell by the look of them whether they are
young or old. They may be any age up to sixty or even sixty-five, but when
they are black and naked they all look alike. No one could do their work
who had not a young man's body, and a figure fit for a guardsman at that,
just a few pounds of extra flesh on the waist-line, and the constant
bending would be impossible. You can never forget that spectacle once you
have seen it--the line of bowed, kneeling figures, sooty black all over,
driving their, huge shovels under the coal with stupendous force and speed.
They are on the job for seven and a half hours, theoretically without a
break, for there is no time 'off'. Actually they, snatch a quarter of an
hour or so at some time during the shift to eat the food they have brought
with them, usually a hunk of bread and dripping and a bottle of cold tea.
The first time I was watching the 'fillers' at work I put my hand upon some
dreadful slimy thing among the coal dust. It was a chewed quid of tobacco.
Nearly all the miners chew tobacco, which is said to be good against
thirst.

Probably you have to go down several coal-mines before you can get
much grasp of the processes that are going on round you. This is chiefly
because the mere effort of getting from place to place; makes it difficult
to notice anything else, In some ways it is even disappointing, or at least
is unlike what you have, expected. You get into the cage, which is a steel
box about as wide as a telephone box and two or three times as long. It
holds ten men, but they pack it like pilchards in a tin, and a tall man
cannot stand upright in it. The steel door shuts upon you, and somebody
working the winding gear above drops you into the void. You have the usual
momentary qualm in your belly and a bursting sensation in the cars, but not
much sensation of movement till you get near the bottom, when the cage
slows down so abruptly that you could swear it is going upwards again. In
the middle of the run the cage probably touches sixty miles an hour; in
some of the deeper mines it touches even more. When you crawl out at the
bottom you are perhaps four hundred yards underground. That is to say you
have a tolerable-sized mountain on top of you; hundreds of yards of solid
rock, bones of extinct beasts, subsoil, flints, roots of growing things,
green grass and cows grazing on it--all this suspended over your head and
held back only by wooden props as thick as the calf of your leg. But
because of the speed at which the cage has brought you down, and the
complete blackness through which you have travelled, you hardly feel
yourself deeper down than you would at the bottom of the Piccadilly tube.

What is surprising, on the other hand, is the immense horizontal
distances that have to be travelled underground. Before I had been down a
mine I had vaguely imagined the miner stepping out of the cage and getting
to work on a ledge of coal a few yards away. I had not realized that before
he even gets to work he may have had to creep along passages as long as
from London Bridge to Oxford Circus. In the beginning, of course, a mine
shaft is sunk somewhere near a seam of coal; But as that seam is worked out
and fresh seams are followed up, the workings get further and further from
the pit bottom. If it is a mile from the pit bottom to the coal face, that
is probably an average distance; three miles is a fairly normal one; there
are even said to be a few mines where it is as much as five miles. But
these distances bear no relation to distances above ground. For in all that
mile or three miles as it may be, there is hardly anywhere outside the main
road, and not many places even there, where a man can stand upright.

You do not notice the effect of this till you have gone a few hundred
yards. You start off, stooping slightly, down the dim-lit gallery, eight or
ten feet wide and about five high, with the walls built up with slabs of
shale, like the stone walls in Derbyshire. Every yard or two there are
wooden props holding up the beams and girders; some of the girders have
buckled into fantastic curves under which you have to duck. Usually it is
bad going underfoot--thick dust or jagged chunks of shale, and in some
mines where there is water it is as mucky as a farm-yard. Also there is the
track for the coal tubs, like a miniature railway track with sleepers a
foot or two apart, which is tiresome to walk on. Everything is grey with
shale dust; there is a dusty fiery smell which seems to be the same in all
mines. You see mysterious machines of which you never learn the purpose,
and bundles of tools slung together on wires, and sometimes mice darting
away from the beam of the lamps. They are surprisingly common, especially
in mines where there are or have been horses. It would be interesting to
know how they got there in the first place; possibly by falling down the
shaft--for they say a mouse can fall any distance uninjured, owing to its
surface area being so large relative to its weight. You press yourself
against the wall to make way for lines of tubs jolting slowly towards the
shaft, drawn by an endless steel cable operated from the surface. You creep
through sacking curtains and thick wooden doors which, when they are
opened, let out fierce blasts of air. These doors are an important part of
the ventilation system. The exhausted air is sucked out of one shaft by
means of fans, and the fresh air enters the other of its own accord. But if
left to itself the air will take the shortest way round, leaving the deeper
workings unventilated; so all the short cuts have to be partitioned off.

At the start to walk stooping is rather a joke, but it is a joke that
soon wears off. I am handicapped by being exceptionally tall, but when the
roof falls to four feet or less it is a tough job for anybody except a
dwarf or a child. You not only have to bend double, you have also got to
keep your head up all the while so as to see the beams and girders and
dodge them when they come. You have, thehefore, a constant crick in the
neck, but this is nothing to the pain in your knees and thighs. After half
a mile it becomes (I am not exaggerating) an unbearable agony. You begin to
wonder whether you will ever get to the end--still more, how on earth you
are going to get back. Your pace grows slower and slower. You come to a
stretch of a couple of hundred yards where it is all exceptionally low and
you have to work yourself along in a squatting position. Then suddenly the
roof opens out to a mysterious height--scene of and old fall of rock,
probably--and for twenty whole yards you can stand upright. The relief is
overwhelming. But after this there is another low stretch of a hundred
yards and then a succession of beams which you have to crawl under. You go
down on all fours; even this is a relief after the squatting business. But
when you come to the end of the beams and try to get up again, you find
that your knees have temporarily struck work and refuse to lift you. You
call a halt, ignominiously, and say that you would like to rest for a
minute or two. Your guide (a miner) is sympathetic. He knows that your
muscles are not the same as his. 'Only another four hundred yards,' he says
encouragingly; you feel that he might as well say another four hundred
miles. But finally you do somehow creep as far as the coal face. You have
gone a mile and taken the best part of an hour; a miner would do it in not
much more than twenty minutes. Having got there, you have to sprawl in the
coal dust and get your strength back for several minutes before you can
even watch the work in progress with any kind of intelligence.

Coming back is worse than going, not only because you are already
tired out but because the journey back to the shaft is slightly uphill. You
get through the low places at the speed of a tortoise, and you have no
shame now about calling a halt when your knees give way. Even the lamp you
are carrying becomes a nuisance and probably when you stumble you drop it;
whereupon, if it is a Davy lamp, it goes out. Ducking the beams becomes
more and more of an effort, and sometimes you forget to duck. You try
walking head down as the miners do, and then you bang your backbone. Even
the miners bang their backbones fairly often. This is the reason why in
very hot mines, where it is necessary to go about half naked, most of the
miners have what they call 'buttons down the back'--that is, a permanent
scab on each vertebra. When the track is down hill the miners sometimes fit
their clogs, which are hollow under-neath, on to the trolley rails and
slide down. In mines where the 'travelling' is very bad all the miners
carry sticks about two and a half feet long, hollowed out below the handle.
In normal places you keep your hand on top of the stick and in the low
places you slide your hand down into the hollow. These sticks are a great
help, and the wooden crash-helmets--a comparatively recent invention--
are a godsend. They look like a French or Italian steel helmet, but they
are made of some kind of pith and very light, and so strong, that you can
take a violent blow on the head without feeling it. When finally you get
back to the surface you have been perhaps three hours underground and
travelled two miles, and you, are more exhausted than you would be by a
twenty-five-mile walk above ground. For a week afterwards your thighs are
so stiff that coming downstairs is quite a difficult feat; you have to work
your way down in a peculiar sidelong manner, without bending the knees.
Your miner friends notice the stiffness of your walk and chaff you about
it. ('How'd ta like to work down pit, eh?' etc.) Yet even a miner who has
been long away front work--from illness, for instance--when he comes
back to the pit, suffers badly for the first few days.

It may seem that I am exaggerating, though no one who has been down an
old-fashioned pit (most of the pits in England are old-fashioned) and
actually gone as far as the coal face, is likely to say so. But what I want
to emphasize is this. Here is this frightful business of crawling to and
fro, which to any normal person is a hard day's work in itself; and it is
not part of the miner's work at all, it is merely an extra, like the City
man's daily ride in the Tube. The miner does that journey to and fro, and
sandwiched in between there are seven and a half hours of savage work. I
have never travelled much more than a mile to the coal face; but often it
is three miles, in which case I and most people other than coal-miners
would never get there at all. This is the kind of point that one is always
liable to miss. When you think of the coal-mine you think of depth, heat,
darkness, blackened figures hacking at walls of coal; you don't think,
necessarily, of those miles of creeping to and fro. There is the question
of time, also. A miner's working shift of seven and a half hours does not
sound very long, but one has got to add on to it at least an hour a day for
'travelling', more often two hours and sometimes three. Of course, the
'travelling' is not technically work and the miner is not paid for it; but
it is as like work as makes no difference. It is easy to say that miners
don't mind all this. Certainly, it is not the same for them as it would be
for you or me. They have done it since childhood, they have the right
muscles hardened, and they can move to and fro underground with a startling
and rather horrible agility. A miner puts his head down and runs, with a
long swinging stride, through places where I can only stagger. At the
workings you see them on all fours, skipping round the pit props almost
like dogs. But it is quite a mistake to think that they enjoy it. I have
talked about this to scores of miners and they all admit that the
'travelling' is hard work; in any case when you hear them discussing a pit
among themselves the 'travelling' is always one of the things they discuss.
It is said that a shift always returns from work faster than it goes;
nevertheless the miners all say that it is the coming away after a hard
day's work, that is especially irksome. It is part of their work and they
are equal to it, but certainly it is an effort. It is comparable, perhaps,
to climbing a smallish mountain before and after your day's work.

When you have been down in two or three pits you begin to get some
grasp of the processes that are going on underground. (I ought to say, by
the way, that I know nothing whatever about the technical side of mining: I
am merely describing what I have seen.) Coal lies in thin seams between
enormous layers of rock, so that essentially the process of getting it out
is like scooping the central layer from a Neapolitan ice. In the old days
the miners used to cut straight into the coal with pick and crowbar--a
very slow job because coal, when lying in its virgin state, is almost as
hard as rock. Nowadays the preliminary work is done by an electrically-
driven coal-cutter, which in principle is an immensely tough and powerful
band-saw, running horizontally instead of vertically, with teeth a couple
of inches long and half an inch or an inch thick. It can move backwards or
forwards on its own power, and the men operating it can rotate it this way
or that. Incidentally it makes one of the most awful noises I have ever
heard, and sends forth clouds of coal dust which make it impossible to see
more than two to three feet and almost impossible to breathe. The machine
travels along the coal face cutting into the base of the coal and
undermining it to the depth of five feet or five feet and a half; after
this it is comparatively easy to extract the coal to the depth to which it
has been undermined. Where it is 'difficult getting', however, it has also
to be loosened with explosives. A man with an electric drill, like a rather
small version of the drills used in street-mending, bores holes at
intervals in the coal, inserts blasting powder, plugs it with clay, goes
round the corner if there is one handy (he is supposed to retire to twenty-
five yards distance) and touches off the charge with an electric current.
This  is not intended to bring the coal out, only to loosen it.
Occasionally, of course, the charge is too powerful, and then it not only
brings the coal out but brings the roof down as well.

After the blasting has been done the 'fillers' can tumble the coal
out, break it up and shovel it on to the conveyor belt. It comes out first
in monstrous boulders which may weigh anything up to twenty tons. The
conveyor belt shoots it on to tubs, and the tubs are shoved into the main
road and hitched on to an endlessly revolving steel cable which drags them
to the cage. Then they are hoisted, and at the surface the coal is sorted
by being run over screens, and if necessary is washed as well. As far as
possible the 'dirt'--the shale, that is--is used for making the roads
below. All what cannot be used is sent to the surface and dumped; hence the
monstrous  'dirt-heaps', like hideous grey mountains, which are the
characteristic scenery of the coal areas. When the coal has been extracted
to the depth to which the machine has cut, the coal face has advanced by
five feet. Fresh props are put in to hold up the newly exposed roof, and
during the next shift the conveyor belt is taken to pieces, moved five feet
forward and re-assembled. As far as possible the three operations of
cutting, blasting and extraction are done in three separate shifts, the
cutting in the afternoon, the blasting at night (there is a law, not always
kept, that forbids its being done when other men are working near by), and
the 'filling' in the morning shift, which lasts from six in the morning
until half past one.

Even when you watch the process of coal-extraction you probably only
watch it for a short time, and it is not until you begin making a few
calculations that you realize what a stupendous task the 'fillers' are
performing. Normally each o man has to clear a space four or five yards
wide. The cutter has undermined the coal to the depth of five feet, so that
if the seam of coal is three or four feet high, each man has to cut out,
break up and load on to the belt something between seven and twelve cubic
yards of coal. This is to say, taking a cubic yard as weighing twenty-seven
hundred-weight, that each man is shifting coal at a speed approaching two
tons an hour. I have just enough experience of pick and shovel work to be
able to grasp what this means. When I am digging trenches in my garden, if
I shift two tons of earth during the afternoon, I feel that I have earned
my tea. But earth is tractable stuff compared with coal, and I don't have
to work kneeling down, a thousand feet underground, in suffocating heat and
swallowing coal dust with every breath I take; nor do I have to walk a mile
bent double before I begin. The miner's job would be as much beyond my
power as it would be to perform on a flying trapeze or to win the Grand
National. I am not a manual labourer and please God I never shall be one,
but there are some kinds of manual work that I could do if I had to. At a
pitch I could be a tolerable road-sweeper or an inefficient gardener or
even a tenth-rate farm hand. But by no conceivable amount of effort or
training could I become a coal-miner, the work would kill me in a few
weeks.

Watching coal-miners at work, you realize momentarily what different
universes people inhabit. Down there where coal is dug is a sort of world
apart which one can quite easily go through life without ever hearing
about. Probably majority of people would even prefer not to hear about it.
Yet it is the absolutely necessary counterpart of our world above.
Practically everything we do, from eating an ice to crossing the Atlantic,
and from baking a loaf to writing a novel, involves the use of coal,
directly or indirectly. For all the arts of peace coal is needed; if war
breaks out it is needed all the more. In time of revolution the miner must
go on working or the revolution must stop, for revolution as much as
reaction needs coal. Whatever may be happening on the surface, the hacking
and shovelling have got to continue without a pause, or at any rate without
pausing for more than a few weeks at the most. In order that Hitler may
march the goose-step, that the Pope may denounce Bolshevism, that the
cricket crowds may assemble at Lords, that the poets may scratch one
another's backs, coal has got to be forthcoming. But on the whole we are
not aware of it; we all know that we 'must have coal', but we seldom or
never remember what coal-getting involves. Here am I sitting writing in
front of my comfortable coal fire. It is April but I still need a fire.
Once a fortnight the coal cart drives up to the door and men in leather
jerkins carry the coal indoors in stout sacks smelling of tar and shoot it
clanking into the coal-hole under the stairs. It is only very rarely, when
I make a definite mental-effort, that I connect this coal with that far-off
labour in the mines. It is just 'coal'--something that I have got to
have; black stuff that arrives mysteriously from nowhere in particular,
like manna except that you have to pay for it. You could quite easily drive
a car right across the north of England and never once remember that
hundreds of feet below the road you are on the miners are hacking at the
coal. Yet in a sense it is the miners who are driving your car forward.
Their lamp-lit world down there is as necessary to the daylight world above
as the root is to the flower.

It is not long since conditions in the mines were worse than they are
now. There are still living a few very old women who in their youth have
worked underground, with the harness round their waists, and a chain that
passed between their legs, crawling on all fours and dragging tubs of coal.
They used to go on doing this even when they were pregnant. And even now,
if coal could not be produced without pregnant women dragging it to and
fro, I fancy we should let them do it rather than deprive ourselves of
coal. But-most of the time, of course, we should prefer to forget that they
were doing it. It is so with all types of manual work; it keeps us alive,
and we are oblivious of its existence. More than anyone else, perhaps, the
miner can stand as the type of the manual worker, not only because his work
is so exaggeratedly awful, but also because it is so vitally necessary and
yet so remote from our experience, so invisible, as it were, that we are
capable of forgetting it as we forget the blood in our veins. In a way it
is even humiliating to watch coal-miners working. It raises in you a
momentary doubt about your own status as an 'intellectual' and a superior
person generally. For it is brought home to you, at least while you are
watching, that it is only because miners sweat their guts out that superior
persons can remain superior. You and I and the editor of the Times Lit.
Supp., and the poets and the Archbishop of Canterbury and Comrade X, author
of Marxism for Infants--all of us really owe the comparative decency of
our lives to poor drudges underground, blackened to the eyes, with their
throats full of coal dust, driving their shovels forward with arms and
belly muscles of steel.




  3

When the miner comes up from the pit his face is so pale that it is
noticeable even through the mask of coal dust. This is due to the foul air
that he has been breathing, and will wear off presently. To a Southerner,
new to the mining districts, the spectacle of a shift of several hundred
miners streaming out of the pit is strange and slightly sinister. Then-
exhausted faces, with the grime clinging in all the hollows, have a fierce,
wild look. At other times, when their faces are clean, there is not much to
distinguish them from the rest of the population. They have a very upright
square-shouldered walk, a reaction from the constant bending underground,
but most of them are shortish men and their thick ill-fitting clothes hide
the splendour of their bodies. The most definitely distinctive thing about
them is the blue scars on their noses. Every miner has blue scars on his
nose and forehead, and will carry them to his death. The coal dust of which
the air underground is full enters every cut, and then the skin grows over
it and forms a blue stain like tattooing, which in fact it is. Some of the
older men have their foreheads veined like Roquefort cheeses from this
cause.

As soon as the miner comes above ground he gargles a little water to
get the worst of the coal dust out of his throat and nostrils, and then
goes home and either washes or does not wash according to his temperament.
From what I have seen I should say that a majority of miners prefer to eat
their  meal  first and wash afterwards,  as I should do in their
circumstances. It is the normal thing to see a miner sitting down to his
tea with a Christy-minstrel face, completely black except for very red lips
which become clean by eating. After his meal he takes a largish basin of
water and washes very methodically, first his hands, then his chest, neck,
and armpits, then his forearms, then his face and scalp (it is on the scalp
that the grime clings thickest), and then his wife takes the flannel and
washes his back. He has only washed the top half of his body and probably
his navel is still a nest of coal dust, but even so it takes some skill to
get pass-ably clean in a single basin of water. For my own part I found I
needed two complete baths after going down a coal-mine. Getting the dirt
out of one's eyelids is a ten minutes' job in itself.

At some of the larger and better appointed collieries there are
pithead baths. This is an enormous advantage, for not only can the miner
wash himself all over every day, in comfort and even luxury, but at the
baths he has two lockers where he can keep his pit clothes separate from
his day clothes, so that within twenty minutes of emerging as black as a
Negro he can be riding off to a football match dressed up to the nines. But
it is only comparatively seldom because a seam of coal does not last for
ever, so that it is not necessarily worth building a bath every time a
shaft is sunk. I can-not get hold of exact figures, but it seems likely
that rather less than one miner in three has access to a pithead bath.
Probably a large majority of miners are completely black from the waist
down for at least six days a week. It is almost impossible for them to wash
all over in their own homes. Every drop of water has got to be heated up,
and in a tiny living-room which contains, apart from the kitchen range and
a quantity of furniture, a wife, some children, and probably a dog, there
is simply not room to have a proper bath. Even with a basin one is bound to
splash the furniture. Middle-class people are fond of saying that the
miners would not wash themselves properly even if they could, but this is
nonsense, as is shown by the fact that where pithead baths exist
practically all the men use them. Only among the very old men does the
belief still linger that washing one's legs 'causes lumbago'. Moreover the
pithead baths, where they exist, are paid for wholly or partly by the
miners themselves, out of the Miners' Welfare Fund. Sometimes the colliery
company subscribes, some-times the Fund bears the whole cost. But doubtless
even at this late date the old ladies in Brighton boarding-houses are
saying that 'if you give those miners baths they only use them to keep coal
in'.

As a matter of fact it is surprising that miners wash as regularly as
they do, seeing how little time they have between work and sleep. It is a
great mistake to think of a miner's working day as being only seven and a
half hours. Seven and a half hours is the time spent actually on the job,
but, as I have already explained, one has got to add on to this time taken
up in 'travelling', which is seldom less than an hour and may often be
three hours. In addition most miners have to spend a considerable time in
getting to and from the pit. Throughout the industrial districts there is
an acute shortage of houses, and it is only in the small mining villages,
where the village is grouped round the pit, that the men can be certain of
living near their work. In the larger mining towns where I have stayed,
nearly everyone went to work by bus; half a crown a week seemed to be the
normal amount to spend on fares. One miner I stayed with was working on the
morning shift, which was from six in the morning till half past one. He had
to be out of bed at a quarter to four and got back somewhere after three in
the afternoon. In another house where I stayed a boy of fifteen was working
on the night shift. He left for work at nine at night and got back at eight
in the morning, had his breakfast, and then promptly went to bed and slept
till six in the evening; so that his leisure time amounted to, about four
hours a day--actually a good deal less, if you take off the time for
washing, eating, and dressing.

The adjustments a miner's family have to make when he is changed from
one shift to another must be tiresome in the extreme. If he is on the night
shift he gets home in time for breakfast, on the morning shift he gets home
in the middle of the afternoon, and on the afternoon shift he gets home in
the middle of the night; and in each case, of course, he wants his
principal meal of the day as soon as he returns. I notice that the Rev. W.
R. Inge, in his book England, accuses the miners of gluttony. From my own
observation I should say that they eat astonishingly little. Most of the
miners I stayed with ate slightly less than I did. Many of them declare
that they cannot do their day's work if they have had a heavy meal
beforehand, and the food they take with them is only a snack, usually
bread-and-dripping and cold tea. They carry it in a flat tin called a snap-
can which they strap to their belts. When a miner gets back late at night
his wife waits up for him, but when he is on the morning shift it seems to
be the custom for him to get his breakfast for himself. Apparently the old
superstition that it is bad luck to see a woman before going to work on the
morning shift is not quite extinct. In the old days, it is said, a miner
who happened to meet a woman in the early morning would often turn back and
do no work that day.

Before I had been in the coal areas I shared the wide-spread illusion
that miners are comparatively well paid. One hears it loosely stated that a
miner is paid ten or eleven shillings a shift, and one does a small
multiplication sum and concludes that every miner is earning round about L2
a week or L150 a year. But the statement that a miner receives ten or
eleven shillings a shift is very misleading. To begin with, it is only the
actual coal 'getter' who is paid at this rate; a 'dataller', for instance,
who attends to the roofing, is paid at a lower rate, usually eight or nine
shillings a shift. Again, when the coal 'getter' is paid piecework, so much
per ton extracted, as is the case in many mines, he is dependent on the
quality of the coal; a breakdown in the machinery or a 'fault'--that is,
a streak of rock running through the coal seam--may rob him of his
earnings for a day or two at a time. But in any case one ought not to think
of the miner as working six days a week, fifty-two weeks a year. Almost
certainly there will be a number of days when he is' laid off'. The average
earning per shift worked for every mine-worker, of all ages and both sexes,
in Great Britain in 1934, was 9s. 1 3/4d. [From the Colliery Tear Book
and Coal Trades Directory for 1935.] If everyone were in work all the
time, this would mean that the mine-worker was earning a little over L142 a
year, or nearly L2 15s. a week. His real income, however, is far lower than
this, for the 9s. 1 3/4d. is merely an average calculation on shifts
actually worked and takes no account of blank days.

I have before me five pay-checks belonging to a Yorkshire miner, for
five weeks (not consecutive) at the beginning of 1936. Averaging them up,
the gross weekly wages they represent is L2 15s. 2d.; this is an average of
nearly 9s. 2 1/2d. a shift. But these pay-checks are for the winter, when
nearly all mines are running full time. As spring advances the coal trade
slacks off and more and more men are 'temporarily stopped', while others
still technically in work are laid off for a day or two in every week. It
is obvious therefore that L150 or even L142 is an immense over-estimate for
the mine-worker's yearly income. As a matter of fact, for the year 1934 the
average gross earnings of all miners through-out Great Britain was only
L115 11s. 6d. It varied consider-ably from district to district, rising as
high as L133 2s. 8d. in Scotland, while in Durham it was a little under
L105 or barely more than L2 a week. I take these figures from The Coid
Scuttle, by Mr Joseph Jones, Mayor of Barnsley, Yorkshire. Mr Jones adds:

  These figures cover the earnings of youths as well as adults and of
the higher- as well as the lower-paid grades... any particularly high
earning would be included in these figures, as would the earnings of
certain officials and other higher-paid men as well as the higher amounts
paid for overtime work.

  The figures, being averages, fail... to reveal the position of
thousands of adult workers whose earnings were substantially below the
average and' who received only 30s. to 40s. or less per week.

Mr Jones's italics. But please notice that even these wretched
earnings are gross earnings. On top of this there are all kinds of
stoppages which are deducted from the miner's wages every week. Here is a
list of weekly stoppages which was given me as typical in one Lancashire
district:

                                        s. d.

Insurance (unemployment and health)     1  5
Hire of lamp                               6
For sharpening tools                       6
Check-weighman                             9
Infirmary                                  2
Hospital                                   1
Benevolent Fund                            6
Union fees                                 6
                                       ----
Total                                    4 5
                                       ----

Some of these stoppages, such as the Benevolent Fund and the union
fees, are, so to speak, the miner's own responsibility, others are imposed
by the colliery company. They are not the same in all districts. For
instance, the iniquitous swindle of making the miner pay for the hire of
his lamp (at sixpence a week he buys the lamp several times over in a
single year) does not obtain everywhere. But the stoppages always seem to
total up to about the same amount. On the Yorkshire miner's five pay-
checks, the average gross earning per week is L2 15s. 2d.; the average net
earning, after the stoppages have come off, is only L2 11s. 4d.--a
reduction of 3s. 10d. a week. But the pay-check, naturally, only mentions
stoppages which are imposed or paid through the colliery company; one has
got to add the union fees, bringing the total reduction up to something
over four shillings. Probably it is safe to say that stoppages of one kind
and another cut four shillings or thereabouts from every adult miner's
weekly wage. So that the L115 11s. 6d. which was the mine-worker's average
earning throughout Great Britain in 1934 should really be something nearer
L105. As against this, most miners receive allowances in kind, being able
to purchase coal for their own use at a reduced rate, usually eight or nine
shillings a ton. But according to Mr Jones, quoted above, 'the average
value of all allowances in kind for the country as a whole is only
fourpence a day'. And this fourpence a day is offset, in many cases, by the
amount the miner has to spend on fares in getting to and from the pit. So,
taking the industry as a whole, the sum the miner can actually bring home
and call his own does not average more, perhaps slightly less, than two
pounds a week.

Meanwhile, how much coal is the average miner producing?

The tonnage of coal raised yearly per person employed in mining rises
steadily though rather slowly. In 1914 every mine-worker produced, on
average, 253 tons of coal; in 1934 he produced 280 tons.[The Coal Scuttle.
The Colliery Yew Book end Coal Trades Directory gives a slightly higher
figure.] This of course is an average figure for mine-workers of all
kinds; those actually working at the coal face extract an enormously
greater amount--in many cases, probably, well over a thousand tons each.
But taking 280 tons as a representative figure, it is worth noticing what
a vast achievement this is. One gets the best idea of it by comparing
a miner's life with somebody else's. If I live to be sixty I shall
probably have produced thirty novels, or enough to fill two medium-sized
library shelves. In the same period the average miner produces 8400 tons
of coal; enough coal to pave Trafalgar Square nearly two feet deep or to
supply seven large families with fuel for over a hundred years.

Of the five pay-checks I mentioned above, no less than three are
rubber-stamped with the words 'death stoppage'. When a miner is killed at
work it is usual for the other miners to make up a subscription, generally
of a shilling each, for his widow, and this is collected by the colliery
company and automatically deducted from their wages. The significant detail
here is the rubber stamp. The rate of accidents among miners is so high,
compared with that in other trades, that casualties are taken for granted
almost as they would be in a minor war. Every year one miner in about nine
hundred is killed and one in about six is injured; most of these injuries,
of course, are petty ones, but a fair number amount to total disablement.
This means that if a miner's working life is forty years the chances are
nearly seven to one against his escaping injury and not much more than
twenty to one against his being killed outright. No other trade approaches
this in dangerousness; the next most dangerous is the shipping trade, one
sailor in a little under 1300 being killed every year. The figures I have
given apply, of course, to mine-workers as a whole; for those actually
working underground the proportion of injuries would be very much higher.
Every miner of long standing that I have talked to had either been in a
fairly serious accident himself or had seen some of his mates killed, and
in every mining family they tell you tales of fathers, brothers, or uncles
killed at work. ('And he fell seven hundred feet, and they wouldn't never
have collected t'pieces only he were wearing a new suit of oil-skins,'
etc., etc., etc.) Some of these tales are appalling in the extreme. One
miner, for instance, described to me how a mate of his, a 'dataller', was
buried by a fall of rock. They rushed to him and managed to uncover his
head and shoulders so that he could breathe, and he was alive and spoke to
them. Then they saw that the roof was coming down again and had to run to
save themselves; the 'dataller' was buried a second time. Once again they
rushed to him and got his head and shoulders free, and again he was alive
and spoke to them. Then the roof came down a third time, and this time they
could not uncover him for several hours, after which, of course, he was
dead. But the miner who told me the story (he had been buried himself on
one occasion, but he was lucky enough to have his head jammed between his
legs so that there was a small space in which he could breathe) did not
think it was a particularly appalling one. Its significance, for him, was
that the 'dataller' had known perfectly well that the place where he was
working was unsafe, and had gone there in daily expectation of an accident.
'And it worked on his mind to that extent that he got to kissing his wife
before he went to work. And she told me afterwards that it were over twenty
years since he'd kissed her.'

The most obviously understandable cause of accidents is explosions of
gas, which is always more or less present in the atmosphere of the pit.
There is a special lamp which is used to test the air for gas, and when it
is present in at all large quantities it can be detected by the flame of an
ordinary Davy lamp burning blue. If the wick can be turned up to its full
extent and the flame is still blue, the proportion of gas is dangerously
high; it is, nevertheless, difficult to detect, because it does not
distribute itself evenly throughout the atmosphere but hangs about in
cracks and crevices. Before starting work a miner often tests for gas by
poking his lamp into all the corners. The gas may be touched off by a spark
during blasting operations, or by a pick striking a spark from a stone, or
by a defective lamp, or by 'gob fires'--spontaneously generated fires
which' smoulder in the coal dust and are very hard to put out. The great
mining disasters which happen from time to time, in which several hundred
men are killed, are usually caused by explosions; hence one tends to think
of explosions as the chief danger of mining. Actually, the great majority
of accidents are due to the normal every-day dangers of the pit; in
particular, to falls of roof. There are, for instance, 'pot-holes'--
circular holes from which a lump of stone big enough to kill a man shoots
out with the promptitude of a bullet. With, so far as I can remember, only
one exception, all the miners I have talked to declared that the new
machinery, and 'speeding up' generally, have made the work more dangerous.
This may be partly due to conservatism, but they can give plenty of
reasons. To begin with, the speed at which the coal is now extracted means
that for hours at a time a dangerously large stretch of roof remains
unpropped. Then there is the vibration, which tends to shake everything
loose, and the noise, which makes it harder to detect signs of danger. One
must remember that a miner's safety underground depend largely on his own
care and skill. An experienced miner claims to know by a sort of instinct
when the roof is unsafe; the way he puts it is that he 'can feel the weight
on him'. He can, for instance, hear the faint creaking of the props. The
reason why wooden props are still generally preferred to iron girders is
that a wooden prop which is about to collapse gives warning by creaking,
whereas a girder flies out un-expectedly. The devastating noise of the
machines makes it impossible to hear anything else, and thus the danger is
increased.

When a miner is hurt it is of course impossible to attend to him
immediately. He lies crushed under several hundred-weight of stone in some
dreadful cranny underground, and even after he has been extricated it is
necessary to drag his body a mile or more, perhaps, through galleries where
nobody can stand upright. Usually when you talk to a man who has been
injured you find that it was a couple of hours or so before they got him to
the surface. Sometimes, of course, there are accidents to the cage. The
cage is shooting several yards up or down at the speed of an express train,
and it is operated by somebody on the surface who cannot see what is
happening. He has very delicate indicators to tell him how far the cage has
got, but it is possible for him to make a mistake, and there have been
cases of the cage crashing into the pit-bottom at its very maximum speed.
This seems to me a dreadful way to die. For as that tiny steel box whizzes
through the blackness there must come a moment when the ten men who are
locked inside it know that something has gone wrong; and the remaining
seconds before they are smashed to pieces hardly bear thinking about. A
miner told me he was once in a cage in which something went wrong. It did
not slow up when it should have done, and they thought the cable must have
snapped. As it happened they got to the bottom safely, but when he stepped
out he found that he had broken a tooth; he had been clenching his teeth so
hard in expectation of that frightful crash.

Apart from accidents miners seem to be healthy, as obviously they have
got to be, considering the muscular efforts demanded of them. They are
liable to rheumatism and a man with defective lungs does not last long in
that dust-impregnated air, but the most characteristic industrial disease
is nystagmus. This is a disease of the eyes which makes the eyeballs
oscillate in a strange manner when they come near a light. It is due
presumably to working in half-darkness, and sometimes results in total
blindness. Miners who are disabled in this way or any other way are
compensated by the colliery company, sometimes with a lump sum, sometimes
with a weekly pension. This pension never amounts to more than twenty-nine
shillings a week; if it falls below fifteen shillings the disabled man can
also get something from the dole or the P.A.C. If I were a disabled miner I
should very much prefer the lump sum, for then at any rate I should know
that I had got my money. Disability pensions are not guaranteed by any
centralized fund, so that if the colliery company goes bankrupt that is the
end of the disabled miner's pension, though he does figure among the other
creditors.

In Wigan I stayed for a while with a miner who was suffering from
nystagmus. He could see across the room but not much further. He had been
drawing compensation of twenty-nine shillings a week for the past nine
months, but the colliery company were now talking of putting him on
'partial compensation' of fourteen shillings a week. It all depended on
whether the doctor passed him as fit for light work 'on top'. Even if the
doctor did pass him there would, needless to say, be no light work
available, but he could draw the dole and the company would have saved
itself fifteen shillings a week. Watching this man go to the colliery to
draw his compensation, I was struck by the profound differences that are
still made by status. Here was a man who had been half blinded in one of
the most useful of all jobs and was drawing a pension to which he had a
perfect right, if anybody has a right to anything. Yet he could not, so to
speak, demand this pension--he could not, for instance, draw it when and
how he wanted it. He had to go to the colliery once a week at a time named
by the company, and when he got there he was kept waiting about for hours
in the cold wind. For all I know he was also expected to touch his cap and
show gratitude to whoever paid him; at any rate he had to waste an
afternoon and spend sixpence in bus fares. It is very different for a
member of the bourgeoisie, even such a down-at-heel member as I am. Even
when I am on the verge of starvation I have certain rights attaching to my
bourgeois status. I do not earn much more than a miner earns, but I do at
least get it paid into my bank in a gentle-manly manner and can draw it out
when I choose. And even when my account is exhausted the bank people are
passably polite.

This business of petty inconvenience and indignity, of being kept
waiting about, of having to do everything at other people's convenience, is
inherent in working-class life. A thousand influences constantly press a
working man down into a passive role. He does not act, he is acted upon. He
feels himself the slave of mysterious authority and has a firm conviction
that 'they' will never allow him to do this, that, and the other. Once when
I was hop-picking I asked the sweated pickers (they earn something under
sixpence an hour) why they did not form a union. I was told immediately
that 'they' would never allow it. Who were 'they'? I asked. Nobody seemed
to know, but evidently 'they' were omnipotent.

A person of bourgeois origin goes through life with some expectation
of getting what he wants, within reasonable limits. Hence the fact that in
times of stress 'educated' people tend to come to the front; they are no
more gifted than the others and their 'education' is generally quite
useless in itself, but they are accustomed to a certain amount of deference
and consequently have the cheek necessary to a commander. That they will
come to the front seems to be taken for granted, always and everywhere. In
Lissagaray's History of the Commune there is an interesting passage
describing the shootings that took place after the Commune had been
suppressed. The authorities were shooting the ringleaders, and as they did
not know who the ringleaders were, they were picking them out on the
principle that those of better class would be the ringleaders. An officer
walked down a line of prisoners, picking out likely-looking types. One man
was shot because he was wearing a watch, another because he 'had an
intelligent face'. I should not like to be shot for having an intelligent
face, but I do agree that in almost any revolt the leaders would tend to be
people who could pronounce their aitches.




  4

AS you walk through the industrial towns you lose yourself in labyrinths of
little brick houses blackened by smoke, festering in planless chaos round
miry alleys and little cindered yards where there are stinking dust-bins
and lines of grimy washing and half-ruinous w.c.s. The interiors of these
houses are always very much the same, though the number of rooms varies
between two or five. All have an almost exactly similar living-room, ten or
fifteen feet square, with an open kitchen range; in the larger ones there
is a scullery as well, in the smaller ones the sink and copper are in the
living-room. At the back there is the yard, or part of a yard shared by a
number of houses, just big enough for the dustbin and the w.c.s. Not a
single one has hot water laid on. You might walk, I suppose, through
literally hundreds of miles of streets inhabited by miners, every one of
whom, when he is in work, gets black from head to foot every day, without
ever passing a house in which one could have a bath. It would have been
very simple to install a hot-water system working from the kitchen range,
but the builder saved perhaps ten pounds on each house by not doing so, and
at the time when these houses were built no one imagined that miners wanted
baths.

For it is to be noted that the majority of these houses are old, fifty
or sixty years old at least, and great numbers of them are by any ordinary
standard not fit for human habitation. They go on being tenanted simply
because there are no others to be had. And that is the central fact about
housing in the industrial areas: not that the houses are poky and ugly, and
insanitary and comfortless, or that they are distributed in incredibly
filthy slums round belching foundries and stinking canals and slag-heaps
that deluge them with sulphurous smoke--though all this is perfectly true
--but simply that there are not enough houses to go round.

'Housing shortage' is a phrase that has been bandied about pretty
freely since the war, but it means very little to anyone with an income of
more than L10 a week, or even L5 a week for that matter. Where rents are
high the difficulty is not to find houses but to find tenants. Walk down
any street in Mayfair and you will see 'To Let' boards in half the windows.
But in the industrial areas the mere difficulty of getting hold of a house
is one of the worst aggravations of poverty. It means that people will put
up with anything--any hole and corner slum, any misery of bugs and
rotting floors and cracking walls, any extortion of skinflint landlords and
blackmailing agents--simply to get a roof over their heads. I have been
into appalling houses, houses in which I would not live a week if you paid
me, and found that the tenants had been there twenty and thirty years and
only hoped they might have the luck to die there. In general these
conditions are taken as a matter of course, though not always. Some people
hardly seem to realize that such things as decent houses exist and look on
bugs and leaking roofs as acts of God; others rail bitterly against their
landlords; but all cling desperately to their houses lest worse should
befall. So long as the housing shortage continues the local authorities
cannot do much to make existing houses more livable. They can 'condemn' a
house, but they cannot order it to be pulled down till the tenant has
another house to go to; and so the condemned houses remain standing and are
all the worse for being condemned, because naturally the landlord will not
spend more than he can help on a house which is going to be demolished
sooner or later. In a town like Wigan, for instance, there are over two
thousand houses standing which have been condemned for years, and whole
sections of the town would be condemned en bloc if there were any hope of
other houses being built to replace them. Towns like Leeds and Sheffield
have scores of thousands of 'back to back' houses which are all of a
condemned type but will remain standing for decades.

I have inspected great numbers of houses in various mining towns and
villages and made notes on their essential points. I think I can best give
an idea of what conditions are like by transcribing a few extracts from my
notebook, taken more or less at random. They are only brief notes and they
will need certain explanations which I will give afterwards. Here are a few
from Wigan:


  1. House in Wallgate quarter. Blind back type. One up, one down.
Living-room measures 12 ft by 10 ft, room upstairs the same. Alcove under
stairs measuring 5 ft by 5 ft and serving as larder, scullery, and coal-
hole. Windows will open. Distance to lavatory 50 yards. Rent 4s. 9d., rates
2s. 6d., total 7s. 3d.

  2. Another near by. Measurements as above, but no alcove under
stairs, merely a recess two feet deep containing the sink--no room for
larder, etc. Rent 3s. 2d., rates 2s., total 5s. 2d.

  3. House in Scholes quarter. Condemned house. One up, one down.
Rooms 15 ft by 15 ft. Sink and copper in living-room, coal-hole under
stairs. Floor subsiding. No windows will open. House decently dry. Landlord
good. Rent 3s. 8d. rates 2s. 6d., total 6s. 2d.

  4. Another near by. Two up, two down, and coal-hole. Walls falling
absolutely to pieces. Water comes into upstairs rooms in quantities. Floor
lopsided. Downstairs windows will not open. Landlord bad. Rent 6s., rates
3s. 6d., total 9s. 6d.

  5. House in Greenough's Row. One up, two down. Living-room 13 ft by
8 ft. Walls coming apart and water comes in. Back windows will not open,
front ones will. Ten in family with eight children very near together in
age. Corporations are trying to evict them for overcrowding but cannot find
another house to send them to. Landlord bad. Rent 4s., rates 2s. 3d., total
6s. 3d.


So much for Wigan. I have pages more of the same type. Here is one
from Sheffield--a typical specimen of Sheffield's several score thousand
'back to back' houses:


  House in Thomas Street. Back to back, two up, one down (i.e. a
three-storey house with one room on each storey). Cellar below. Living-room
14 ft by 10 ft, and rooms above corresponding. Sink in living-room. Top
floor has no door but gives on open stairs, Walls in living-room slightly
damp, walls in top rooms coming to pieces and oozing damp on all sides.
House is so dark that light has to be kept burning all day. Electricity
estimated at 6d. a day (probably an exaggeration). Six in family, parents
and foul children. Husband (on P.A.C.) is tuberculous. One child in
hospital, the others appear healthy. Tenants have been seven years in this
house. Would move, but no other house available. Rent 6s. 6d., rates
included.


Here are one or two from Barnslcy:


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

  2. House in Peel Street. Back to back, two up, two down and large
cellar. Living-room loft square with copper and sink. The other downstairs
room the same size, probably intended as par-lour but used as bedroom.
Upstairs rooms the same size as those below. Living-room very dark.
Gas-light estimated at 4 1/2d. a day. Distance to lavatory 70 yards. Four
beds in house for eight people--two old parents, two adult girls (the
eldest aged twenty-seven), one young man, and three children. Parents have
one bed, eldest son another, and remaining five people share the other two.
Bugs very bad--'You can't keep 'em down when it's 'ot.' Indescribable
squalor in downstairs room and smell upstairs almost unbearable. Rent 5s.
7 1/2d., including rates.

  3. House in Mapplewell (small mining village near Barnsley). Two
up, one down. Living-room 14 ft by 13 ft. Sink in living-room. Plaster
cracking and coming off walls. No shelves in oven. Gas leaking slightly.
The upstairs rooms each 10 ft by 8 ft. Four beds (for six persons, all
adult), but 'one bed does nowt', presumably for lack of bedclothes. Room
nearest stairs has no door and stairs have no banister, so that when you
step out of bed your foot hangs in vacancy and you may fall ten feet on to
stones. Dry rot so bad that one can see through the floor into the room
below. Bugs, but 'I keeps 'em down with sheep dip'. Earth road past these
cottages is like a muck-heap and said to be almost impassable in winter.
Stone lavatories at ends of gardens in semi-ruinous condition. Tenants have
been twenty-two years in this house. Are L11 in arrears with rent, and have
been paying an extra 1s. a week to pay this off. Landlord now refuses this
and has served orders to quit. Rent 5s., including rates.


And so on and so on and so on. I could multiply examples by the score
--they could be multiplied by the hundred thousand if anyone chose to make
a house-to-house inspection throughout the industrial districts. Meanwhile
some of the expressions I have used need explaining. 'One up, one down'
means one room on each storey--i.e. a two-roomed house. 'Back to back'
houses are two houses built in one, each side of the house being somebody's
front door, so that if you walk down a row of what is apparently twelve
houses you are in reality seeing not twelve houses but twenty-four. The
front houses give on the street and the back ones on the yard, and there is
only one way out of each house. The effect of this is obvious. The
lavatories are in the yard at the back, so that if you live on the side
facing the street, to get to the lavatory or the dust-bin you have to go
out of the front door and walk round the end of the block--a distance
that may be as much as two hundred yards; if you live at the back, on the
other hand, your outlook is on to a row of lavatories. There are also
houses of what is called the 'blind back' type, which are single houses,
but in which the builder has omitted to put in a back door--from pure
spite, apparently. The windows which refuse to open are a peculiarity of
old mining towns. Some of these towns are so undermined by ancient workings
that the ground is constantly subsiding and the houses above slip sideways.
In Wigan you pass whole rows of houses which have slid to startling angles,
their windows being ten or twenty degrees out of the horizontal. Sometimes
the front wall bellies outward till it looks as though the house were seven
months gone in pregnancy. It can be refaced, but the new facing soon begins
to bulge again. When a house sinks at all suddenly its windows are jammed
for ever and the door has to be refitted. This excites no surprise locally.
The story of the miner who comes home from work and finds that he can only
get indoors by smashing down the front door with an axe is considered
humorous. In some cases I have noted 'Landlord good' or 'Landlord bad',
because there is great variation in what the slum-dwellers say about their
landlords. I found--one might expect it, perhaps--that the small
landlords are usually the worst. It goes against the grain to say this, but
one can see why it should be so. Ideally, the worst type of slum landlord
is a fat wicked man, preferably a bishop, who is drawing an immense income
from extortionate rents. Actually, it is a poor old woman who has invested
her life's savings in three slum houses, inhabits one of them, and tries to
live on the rent of the other two--never, in consequence, having any
money for repairs.

But mere notes like these are only valuable as reminders to myself. To
me as I read them they bring back what I have seen, but they cannot in
themselves give much idea of what conditions are like in those fearful
northern slums. Words are such feeble things. What is the use of a brief
phrase like 'roof leaks' or 'four beds for eight people'? It is the kind of
thing your eye slides over, registering nothing. And yet what a wealth of
misery it can cover! Take the question of overcrowding, for instance. Quite
often you have eight or even ten people living in a three-roomed house. One
of these rooms is a living-room, and as it probably measures about a dozen
feet square and contains, besides the kitchen range and the sink, a table,
some chairs, and a dresser, there is no room in it for a bed. So there are
eight or ten people sleeping in two small rooms, probably in at most four
beds. If some of these people are adults and have to go to work, so much
the worse. In one house, I remember, three grown-up girls shared the same
bed and all went to work at different hours, each disturbing the others
when she got up or came in; in another house a young miner working on the
night shift slept by day in a narrow bed in which another member of the
family slept by night. There is an added difficulty when there are grown-up
children, in that you cannot let adolescent youths and girls sleep in the
same bed. In one family I visited there were a father and mother and a son
and daughter aged round about seventeen, and only two beds for the lot of
them. The father slept with the son and the mother with the daughter; it
was the only arrangement that ruled out the danger of incest. Then there is
the misery of leaking roofs and oozing walls, which in winter makes some
rooms almost uninhabitable. Then there are bugs. Once bugs get into a house
they are in it till the crack of doom; there is no sure way of
exterminating them. Then there are the windows that will not open. I need
not point out what this must mean, in summer, in a tiny stuffy living-room
where the fire, on which all the cooking is done, has to be kept burning
more or less constantly. And there are the special miseries attendant upon
back to back houses. A fifty yards' walk to the lavatory or the dust-bin is
not exactly an inducement to be clean. In the front houses--at any rate
in a side-street where the Corporation don't interfere--the women get
into the habit of throwing their refuse out of the front door, so that the
gutter is always littered with tea-leaves and bread crusts. And it is worth
considering what it is like for a child to grow up in one of the back
alleys where its gaze is bounded by a row of lavatories and a wall.

In such places as these a woman is only a poor drudge muddling among
an infinity of jobs. She may keep up her spirits, but she cannot keep up
her standards of cleanliness and tidiness. There is always something to be
done, and no conveniences and almost literally not room to turn round. No
sooner have you washed one child's face than another's is dirty; before you
have washed the crocks from one meal the next is due to be cooked. I found
great variation in the houses I visited. Some were as decent as one could
possibly expect in the circumstances, some were so appalling that I have no
hope of describing them adequately. To begin with, the smell, the dominant
and essential thing, is indescribable. But the squalor and the confusion! A
tub full of filthy water here, a basin full of unwashed crocks there, more
crocks piled in any odd corner, torn newspaper littered everywhere, and in
the middle always the same dreadful table covered with sticky oilcloth and
crowded with cooking pots and irons and half-darned stockings and pieces of
stale bread and bits of cheese wrapped round with greasy newspaper! And the
congestion in a tiny room where getting from one side to the other is a
complicated voyage between pieces of furniture, with a line of damp washing
getting you in the face every time you move and the children as thick
underfoot as toadstools! There are scenes that stand out vividly in my
memory. The almost bare living-room of a cottage in a little mining
village, where the whole family was out of work and everyone seemed to be
underfed; and the big family of grown-up sons and daughters sprawling
aimlessly about, all strangely alike with red hair, splendid bones, and
pinched faces ruined by malnutrition and idleness; and one tall son sitting
by the fire-place, too listless even to notice the entry of a stranger, and
slowly peeling a sticky sock from a bare foot. A dreadful room in Wigan
where all the furniture seemed to be made of packing cases and barrel
staves and was coming to pieces at that; and an old woman with a blackened
neck and her hair coining down denouncing her landlord in a Lancashire-
Irish accent; and her mother, aged well over ninety, sitting in the
background on the barrel that served her as a commode and regarding us
blankly with a yellow, cretinous face. I could fill up pages with memories
of similar interiors.

Of course the squalor of these people's houses is some-times their own
fault. Even if you live in a back to back house and have four children and
a total income of thirty-two and sixpence a week from the P.A.C., there is
no need to have unemptied chamber-pots standing about in your living-room.
But it is equally certain that their circumstances do not encourage self-
respect. The determining factor is probably the number of children. The
best-kept interiors I saw were always childless houses or houses where
there were only one or two children; with, say, six children in a three-
roomed house it is quite impossible to keep anything decent. One thing that
is very noticeable is that the worst squalors are never downstairs. You
might visit quite a number of houses, even among the poorest of the
unemployed, and bring away a wrong impression. These people, you might
reflect, cannot be so badly off if they still have a fair amount of
furniture and crockery. But it is in the rooms upstairs that the gauntness
of poverty really discloses itself. Whether this is because pride makes
people cling to their living-room furniture to the last, or because bedding
is more pawnable, I do not know, but certainly many of the bedrooms I saw
were fearful places. Among people who have been unemployed for several
years continuously I should say it is the exception to have anything like a
full set of bedclothes. Often there is nothing that can be properly called
bedclothes at all--just a heap of old overcoats and miscellaneous rags on
a rusty iron bedstead. In this way overcrowding is aggravated. One family
of four persons that I knew, a father and mother and two children,
possessed two beds but could only use one of them because they had not
enough bedding for the other.

Anyone who wants to see the effects of the housing shortage at their
very worse should visit the dreadful caravan-dwellings that exist in
numbers in many of the northern towns. Ever since the war, in the complete
impossibility of getting houses, parts of the population have overflowed
into supposedly temporary quarters in fixed caravans. Wigan, for instance,
with a population of about 85,000, has round about 200 caravan-dwellings
with a family in each--perhaps somewhere near 1000 people in all. How
many of these caravan-colonies exist throughout the industrial areas it
would be difficult to discover with any accuracy. The local authorities are
reticent about them and the census report of 1931 seems to have decided to
ignore them. But so far as I can discover by inquiry they are to be found
in most of the larger towns in Lancashire and Yorkshire, and perhaps
further north as well. The probability is that throughout the north of
England there are some thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of families
(not individuals) who have no home except a fixed caravan.

But the word 'caravan' is very misleading. It calls up a picture of a
cosy gypsy-encampment (in fine weather, of course) with wood fires
crackling and children picking blackberries and many-coloured washing
fluttering on the lines. The caravan-colonies in Wigan and Sheffield are
not like that. I had a look at several of them, I inspected those in Wigan
with considerable care, and I have never seen comparable squalor except in
the Far East. Indeed when I saw them I was immediately reminded of the
filthy kennels in which I have seen Indian coolies living in Burma. But, as
a matter of fact, nothing in the East could ever be quite as bad, for in
the East you haven't our clammy, penetrating cold to contend with, and the
sun is a disinfectant.

Along the banks of Wigan's miry canal are patches of waste ground on
which the caravans have been dumped like rubbish shot out of a bucket. Some
of them are actually gypsy caravans, but very old ones and in bad repair.
The majority are old single-decker buses (the rather smaller buses of ten
years ago) which have been taken off their wheels and propped up with
struts of wood. Some are simply wagons with semi-circular slats on top,
over which canvas is stretched, so that the people inside have nothing but
canvas between them and the outer air. Inside, these places are usually
about five feet wide by six high (I could not stand quite upright in any of
them) and anything from six to fifteen feet long. Some, I suppose, are
inhabited by only one person, but I did not see any that held less than two
persons, and some of them contained large families. One, for instance,
measuring fourteen feet long, had seven people in it--seven people in
about 450 cubic feet of space; which is to say that each person had for his
entire dwelling a space a good deal smaller than one compartment of a
public lavatory. The dirt and congestion of these places is such that you
cannot well imagine it unless you have tested it with your own eyes and
more particularly your nose. Each contains a tiny cottage kitchener and
such furniture as can be crammed in--sometimes two beds, more usually
one, into which the whole family have to huddle as best they can. It is
almost impossible to sleep on the floor, because the damp soaks up from
below. I was shown mat-tresses which were still wringing wet at eleven in
the morning. In winter it is so cold that the kitcheners have to be kept
burning day and night, and the windows, need-less to say, are never opened.
Water is got from a hydrant common to the whole colony, some of the
caravan-dwellers having to walk 150 or 200 yards for every bucket of water.
There are no sanitary arrangements at all. Most of the people construct a
little hut to serve as a lavatory on the tiny patch of ground surrounding
their caravan, and once a week dig a deep hole in which to bury the refuse.
All the people I saw in these places, especially the children, were
unspeakably dirty, and I do not doubt that they were lousy as well. They
could not possibly be otherwise. The thought that haunted me as I went from
caravan to caravan was, What can happen in those cramped interiors when
anybody dies? But that, of course, is the kind of question you hardly care
to ask.

Some of the people have been in their caravans for many years.
Theoretically the Corporation are doing away with the caravan-colonies and
getting the inhabitants out into houses; but as the houses don't get built,
the caravans remain standing. Most of the people I talked to had given up
the idea of ever getting a decent habitation again. They were all out of
work, and a job and a house seemed to them about equally remote and
impossible. Some hardly seemed to care; others realized quite clearly in
what misery they were living. One woman's face stays by me, a worn skull-
like face on which was a look of intolerable misery and degradation. I
gathered that in that dreadful pigsty, struggling to keep her large brood
of children clean, she felt as I should feel if I were coated all over with
dung. One must remember that these people are not gypsies; they are decent
English people who have all, except the children born there, had homes of
their own in their day; besides, their caravans are greatly inferior to
those of gypsies and they have not the great advantage of being on the
move. No doubt there are still middle-class people who think that the Lower
Orders don't mind that kind of thing and who, if they happened to pass a
caravan-colony in the train, would immediately assume that the people lived
there from choice. I never argue nowadays with that kind of person. But it
is worth noticing that the caravan-dwellers don't even save money by living
there, for they are paying about the same rents as they would for houses. I
could not hear of any rent lower than five shillings a week (five shillings
for 200 cubic feet of space!) and there are even cases where the rent is as
high as ten shillings. Somebody must be making a good thing out of those
caravans! But dearly their continued existence is due to the housing
shortage and not directly to poverty.

Talking once with a miner I asked him. when the housing shortage first
became acute in his district; he answered, 'When we were told about it',
meaning that till recently people's standards were so low that they took
almost any degree of overcrowding for granted. He added that when he was a
child his family had slept eleven in a room and thought nothing of it, and
that later, when he was grown-up, he and his wife had lived in one of the
old-style back to back houses in which you not only had to walk a couple of
hundred yards to the lavatory but often had to wait in a queue when you got
there, the lavatory being shared by thirty-six people. And when his wife
was sick with the illness that killed her, she still had to make that two
hundred yards' journey to the lavatory. This, he said, was the kind of
thing people would put up with 'till they were told about it'.

I do not know whether that is true. What is certain is that nobody now
thinks it bearable to sleep eleven in a room, and that even people with
comfortable incomes are vaguely troubled by the thought of 'the slums'.
Hence the clatter about 'rehousing' and 'slum clearance' which we have had
at intervals ever since the war. Bishops, politicians, philanthropists, and
what not enjoy talking piously about 'slum clearance', because they can
thus divert attention from more serious evils and pretend that if you
abolish the slums you abolish poverty. But all this talk has led to
surprisingly small results. So far as one can discover, the congestion is
no better, perhaps slightly worse, than it was a dozen years ago. There is
certainly great variation in the speed at which the different towns are
attacking their housing problem. In some towns building seems to be almost
at a standstill, in others it is proceeding rapidly and the private
landlord is being driven out of business. Liver-pool, for instance, has
been very largely rebuilt, mainly by the efforts of the Corporation.
Sheffield, too, is being torn down and rebuilt pretty fast, though perhaps,
considering the unparalleled beastliness of its slums, not quite fast
enough.[The number of Corporation houses in process of construction in
Sheffield at the beginning of 1936 was 1398. To replace the slum areas
entirely Sheffield is said to need 100,000 houses.]

Why rehousing has on the whole moved so slowly, and why some towns can
borrow money for building purposes so much more easily than others, I do
not know. Those questions would have to be answered by someone who knows
more about the machinery of local government than I do. A Corporation house
costs normally somewhere between three and four hundred pounds; it costs
rather less when it is built by 'direct labour' than when built by
contract. The rent of these houses would average something over twenty
pounds a year not counting rates, so one would think that, even allowing
for overhead expenses and interest on loans, it would pay any Corporation
to build as many houses as could be tenanted. In many cases, of course, the
houses would have to be inhabited by people on the P.A.C., so that the
local bodies would merely be taking money out of one pocket and putting it
into another--i.e. paying out money in the form of relief and taking it
back in the form of rent. But they have got to pay the relief in any case,
and at present a proportion of what they pay is being swallowed up by
private landlords. The reasons given for the slow rate of building are lack
of money and the difficulty of getting hold of sites--for Corporation
houses are not erected piecemeal but in 'estates', sometimes of hundreds of
houses at a time. One thing that always strikes me as mysterious is that so
many of the northern towns see fit to build themselves immense and
luxurious public buildings at the same time as they are in crying need of
dwelling houses. The town of Barnsley, for instance, recently spent close
on L150,000 on a new town hall, although admittedly needing at least 2000
new working-class houses, not to mention public baths. (The public baths in
Barnsley contain nineteen men's slipper baths--this in a town of 70,000
inhabitants, largely miners, not one of whom has a bath in his house!) For
L150,000 it could have built 350 Corporation houses and still had L10,000
to spend on a town hall. However, as I say, I do not pretend to understand
the mysteries of local government. I merely record the fact that houses are
desperately needed and are being built, on the whole, with paralytic
slowness.

Still, houses are being built, and the Corporation building estates,
with their row upon row of little red houses, all much liker than two. peas
(where did that expression come from? Peas have great individuality) are a
regular feature of the outskirts of the industrial towns. As to what they
are like and how they compare with the slum houses, I can best give an idea
by transcribing two more extracts from my diary. The tenants' opinions of
their houses vary greatly, so I will give one favourable extract and one
unfavourable. Both of these are from Wigan and both are the cheaper 'non-
parlour type' houses:


  1. House in Beech Hill Estate.

  Downstairs. Large living-room with kitchener fireplace, cup-boards,
and fixed dresser, composition floor. Small hallway, largish kitchen. Up to
date electric cooker hired from Corporation at much the same rate as a gas
cooker.

  Upstairs. Two largish bedrooms, one tiny one--suitable only for a
boxroom or temporary bedroom. Bathroom, w.c., with hot and cold water.

  Smallish garden. These vary throughout the estate, but mostly
rather smaller than an allotment.

  Four in family, parents and two children. Husband in good employ.
Houses appear well built and are quite agreeable to look at. Various
restrictions, e.g. it is forbidden to keep poultry or pigeons, take in
lodgers, sub-let, or start any kind of business with-out leave from the
Corporation. (This is easily granted in the case of taking in lodgers, but
not in any of the others.) Tenant' very well satisfied with house and proud
of it. Houses in this estate all well kept. Corporation are good about
repairs, but keep tenants up to the mark with regard to keeping the place
tidy, etc.

  Rent 11s. 3d. including rates. Bus fare into town 2d.


  2. House in Welly Estate.

  Downstairs. Living-room 14 ft by 10 ft, kitchen a good deal
smaller, tiny larder under stairs, small but fairly good bathroom. Gas
cooker, electric lighting. Outdoor w.c.

  Upstairs. One bedroom 12 ft by 10 ft with tiny fireplace, another
the same size without fireplace, another 7 ft by 6 ft. Best bedroom has
small wardrobe let into wall. 'Garden about 20 yards by 10.

  Six in family, parents and four children, eldest son nineteen,
eldest daughter twenty-two. None in work except eldest son. Tenants very
discontented. Their complaints are: 'House is cold, draughty, and damp.
Fireplace in living-room gives out no heat and makes room very dusty--
attributed to its being set too low. Fireplace in best bedroom too small to
be of any use. Walls upstairs cracking. Owing to uselessness of tiny
bedroom, five are sleeping in one bedroom, one (the eldest son) in the
other.'

  Gardens in this estate all neglected.

  Rent 10s. 3d., inclusive. Distance to town a little over a mile--
there is no bus here.


I could multiply examples, but these two are enough, as the types of
Corporation houses being built do not vary greatly from place to place. Two
things are immediately obvious. The first is that at their very worst the
Corporation houses are better than the slums they replace. The mere
possession of a bathroom and a bit of garden would out-weigh almost any
disadvantage. The other is that they are much more expensive to live in. It
is common enough for a man to be turned out of a condemned house where he
is paying six or seven shillings a week and given a Corporation house where
he has to pay ten. This only affects those who are in work or have recently
been in work, because when a man is on the P.A.C. his rent is assessed at a
quarter of his dole, and if it is more than this he gets an extra
allowance; in any case, there are certain classes of Corporation houses to
which people on the dole are not admitted. But there are other ways in
which life in a Corporation estate is expensive, whether you are in work or
out of it. To begin with, owing to the higher rents, the shops in the
estate are much more expensive and there are not so many of them. Then
again, in a comparatively large, detached house, away from the frowsy
huddle of the slum, it is much colder and more fuel has to be burnt. And
again there is the expense, especially for a man in work, of getting to and
from town. This last is one of the more obvious problems of rehousing. Slum
clearance means diffusion of the population. When you rebuild on a large
scale, what you do in effect is to scoop out the centre of the town and
redistribute it on the outskirts. This is all very well in a way; you have
got the people out of fetid alleys into places where they have room to
breathe; but from the point of view of the people themselves, what you have
done is to pick them up and dump them down five miles from their work. The
simplest solution is flats. If people are going to live in large towns at
all they must learn to live on top of one another. But the northern working
people do not take kindly to flats; even where fiats exist they are
contemptuously named 'tenements'. Almost everyone will tell you that he
'wants a house of his own', and apparently a house in the middle of an
unbroken block of houses a hundred yards long seems to them more 'their
own' than a flat situated in mid-air.

To revert to the second of the two Corporation houses I have just
mentioned. The tenant complained that the house was cold, damp, and so
forth. Perhaps the house was jerry-built, but equally probably he was
exaggerating. He had come there from a filthy hovel in the middle of Wigan
which I happened to have inspected previously; while there he had made
every effort to get hold of a Corporation house, and he was no sooner in
the Corporation house than he wanted to be back in the slum. This looks
like mere captiousness but it covers a perfectly genuine grievance. In very
many cases, perhaps in half the cases, I found that the people in
Corporation houses don't really like them. They are glad to get out of the
stink of the slum, they know that it is better for their children to have
space to play about in, but they don't feel really at home. The exceptions
are usually people in good employ who can afford to spend a little extra on
fuel and furniture and journeys, and who in any case are of 'superior'
type. The others, the typical slum-dwellers, miss the frowsy warmth of the
slum. They complain that 'out in the country', i.e. on the edge of the
town, they are 'starving' (freezing). Certainly most Corporation estates
are pretty bleak in winter. Some I have been through, perched on treeless
clayey hillsides and swept by icy winds, would be horrible places to live
in. It is not that slum-dwellers want dirt and congestion for their own
sakes, as the fat-bellied bourgeoisie love to believe. (See for instance
the conversation about slum-clearance in Galsworthy's Swan Song, where the
rentier's cherished belief that the slum-dweller makes the slum, and not
vice versa, is put into the mouth of a philanthropic Jew.) Give people a
decent house and they will soon learn to keep it decent. Moreover, with a
smart-looking house to live up to they improve in self-respect and
cleanliness,  and their  children start  life with  better chances.
Nevertheless, in a Corporation estate there is an uncomfortable, almost
prison-like atmosphere, and the people who live there are perfectly well
aware of it.

And it is here that one comes on the central difficulty of the housing
problem. When you walk through the smoke-dim slums of Manchester you think
that nothing is needed except to tear down these abominations and build
decent houses in their place. But the trouble is that in destroying the
slum you destroy other things as well. Houses are I' desperately needed and
are not being built fast enough; but in so far as rehousing is being done,
it is being done--perhaps it is unavoidable--in a monstrously inhuman
'manner. I don't mean merely that the houses are new and ugly. All houses
have got to be new at some time, and as a matter of fact the type of
Corporation house now being built is not at all offensive to look at. On
the outskirts of Liverpool there are what amount to whole towns consisting
entirely of Corporation houses, and they are quite pleasing to the eye; the
blocks of workers' flats in the centre of the town modelled, I believe, on
the workers' flats in Vienna, are definitely fine buildings. But there is
something ruthless and soulless about the whole business. Take, for
instance, the restrictions with which you are burdened in a Corporation
house. You are not allowed to keep your house and garden as you want them
--in some estates there is even a regulation that every garden must have
the same kind of hedge. You are not allowed to keep poultry or pigeons. The
Yorkshire miners are fond of keeping homer pigeons; they keep them in the
back yard and take them out and race them on Sundays. But pigeons are messy
birds and the Corporation suppresses them as a matter of course. The
restrictions about shops are more serious. The number of shops in a
Corporation estate is rigidly limited, and it is said that preference is
given to the Co-op and the chain stores; this may not be strictly true, but
certainly those are the shops that one usually sees there. This is bad
enough for the general public, but from the point of view of the
independent shopkeeper it is a disaster. Many a small shopkeeper is utterly
ruined by some rehousing scheme which takes no notice of his existence. A
whole section of the town is condemned en bloc; presently the houses are
pulled down and the people are transferred to some housing estate miles
away. In this way all the small shopkeepers of the quarter have their whole
clientele taken away from them at a single swoop and receive not a penny of
compensation. They cannot transfer their business to the estate, because
even if they can afford the move and the much higher rents, they would
probably be refused a licence. As for pubs, they are banished from the
housing estates almost completely, and the few that remain are dismal sham-
Tudor places fitted out by the big brewery companies and very expensive.
For a middle-class population this would be a nuisance--it might mean
walking a mile to get a glass of beer; for a working-class population,
which uses the pub as a kind of club, it is a serious blow at communal
life. It is a great achievement to get slum-dwellers into decent houses,
but it is unfortunate that, owing to the peculiar temper of our time, it is
also considered necessary to rob them of the last vestiges of their
liberty. The people themselves feel this, and it is this feeling that they
are rationalizing when they complain that their new houses--so much better,
as houses, than those they have come out of--are cold and uncomfortable and
'unhomelike'.

I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal
vigilance as eternal dirt. There are some Corporation estates in which new
tenants are systematically de-loused before being allowed into their
houses. All their possessions except what they stand up in are taken away
from them, fumigated, and sent on to the new house. This procedure has its
points, for it is a pity that people should take bugs into brand new houses
(a bug will follow you about in your luggage if he gets half a chance), but
it is the kind of thing that makes you wish that the word 'hygiene' could
be dropped out of the dictionary. Bugs are bad, but a state of affairs in
which men will allow themselves to be dipped like sheep is worse. 'Perhaps,
however, when it is a case of slum clearance, one must take for granted a
certain amount of restrictions and inhumanity. When all is said and done,
the most important thing is that people shall live in decent houses and not
in pigsties. I have seen too much of slums to go into Chestertonian
raptures about them. A place where the children can breathe clean air, and
women have a few conveniences to save them from drudgery, and a man has a
bit of garden to dig in, must be better than the stinking back-streets of
Leeds and Sheffield. On balance, the Corporation Estates are better than
the slums; but only by a small margin.

When I was looking into the housing question I visited and inspected
numbers of houses, perhaps a hundred or two hundred houses altogether, in
various mining towns and villages. I cannot end this chapter without
remarking on the extraordinary courtesy and good nature with which I was
received everywhere. I did not go alone--I always had some local friend
among the unemployed to show me round--but even so, it is an impertinence
to go poking into strangers' houses and asking to see the cracks in the
bedroom wall. Yet everyone was astonishingly patient and seemed to
understand almost without explanation why I was questioning them and what I
wanted to see. If any unauthorized person walked into my house and began
asking me whether the roof leaked and whether I was much troubled by bugs
and what I thought of my landlord, I should probably tell him to go to
hell. This only happened to me once, and in that case the woman was
slightly deaf and took me for a Means Test nark; but even she relented
after a while and gave me the information I wanted.

I am told that it is bad form for a writer to quote his own reviews,
but I want here to contradict a reviewer in the Manchester Guardian who
says apropos of one of my books:


  Set down in Wigan or Whitechapel Mr Orwell would still exercise an
unerring power of closing his vision to all that is good in order to
proceed with his wholehearted vilification of humanity.


Wrong. Mr Orwell was 'set down' in Wigan for quite a while and it did
not inspire him with any wish to vilify humanity. He liked Wigan very much
--the people, not the scenery. Indeed, he has only one fault to find with
it, and that is in respect of the celebrated Wigan Pier, which he had set
his heart on seeing. Alas! Wigan Pier had been demolished, and even the
spot where it used to stand is no longer certain.




  5

When you see the unemployment figures quoted at two millions, it is fatally
easy to take this as meaning that two million people are out of work and
the rest of the population is comparatively comfortable. I admit that till
recently I was in the habit of doing so myself. I used to calculate that if
you put the registered unemployed at round about two millions and threw in
the destitute and those who for one reason and another were not registered,
you might take the number of underfed people in England (for everyone on
the dole or thereabouts is underfed) as being, at the very most, five
millions.

This is an enormous under-estimate, because, in the first place, the
only people shown on unemployment figures are those actually drawing the
dole--that is, in general, heads of families. An unemployed man's
dependants do not figure on the list unless they too are drawing a separate
allowance. A Labour Exchange officer told me that to get at the real number
of people living on (not drawing) the dole, you have got to multiply the
official figures by something over three. This alone brings the number of
unemployed to round about six millions. But in addition there are great
numbers of people who are in work but who, from a financial point of view,
might equally well be unemployed, because they are not drawing anything
that can be described as a living wage.[For instance, a recent census of
the Lancashire cotton mills revealed the fact that over 40,000 full-time
employees receive less than thirty shillings a week each. In Preston,
to take only one town, the number receiving over thirty shillings a week
was 640 and the number receiving wider thirty shillings was 3113.] Allow
for these and their dependants, throw in as before the old-age pensioners,
the destitute, and other nondescripts, and you get an underfed population
of well over ten millions. Sir John Orr puts it at twenty millions.

Take the figures for Wigan, which is typical enough of the industrial
and mining districts. The number of insured workers is round about 36,000
(26,000 men and 10,000 women). Of these, the number unemployed at the
beginning of 1936 was about 10,000. But this was in winter when the mines
are working full time; in summer it would probably be 12,000. Multiply by
three, as above, and you get 30,000 or 36,000. The total population of
Wigan is a little under 87,000; so that at any moment more than one person
in three out of the whole population--not merely the registered workers
--is either drawing or living on the dole. Those ten or twelve thousand
unemployed contain a steady core of from four to five thousand miners who
have been continuously unemployed for the past seven years. And Wigan is
not especially badly off as industrial towns go. 'Even in Sheffield, which
has been doing well for the last year or so because of wars and rumours of
war, the proportion of unemployment is about the same--one in three of
registered workers unemployed.

When a man is first unemployed, until his insurance stamps are
exhausted, he draws 'full benefit', of which the rates are as follows:


                    per week

Single man            17s.
Wife                   9s.
Each child below 14    3s.


Thus in a typical family of parents and three children of whom one was
over fourteen, the total income would be 32s. per week, plus anything that
might be earned by the eldest child. When a man's stamps are exhausted,
before being turned over to the P.A.C. (Public Assistance Committee), he
receives  twenty-six  weeks' 'transitional  benefit' from the U.A.B.
(Unemployment Assistance Board), the rates being as follows:



                   per week

Single man           15s.
Man and wife         24s.
Children 14-18        6s.
Children 11-14        4s. 6d.
Children 8-11         4s.
Children 5-8          3s. 6d.
Children 3-5          3s.


Thus on the U.A.B. the income of the typical family of five persons
would be 37s. 6d. a week if no child was in work. When a man is on the
U.A.B. a quarter of his dole is regarded as rent, with a minimum of 7s. 6d.
a week. If the rent he is paying is more than a quarter of his dole he
receives  an extra allowance, but if it is less than 7s. 6d., a
corresponding amount is deducted. Payments on the P.A.C. theoretically
comes out of the local rates, but are backed by a central fund. The rates
of benefit are:


                      per week

Single man             12s. 6d.
Man and wife           23s.
Eldest child            4s.
Any other child         3s.


Being at the discretion of the local bodies these rates vary slightly,
and a single man may or may not get an extra 2s. 6d. weekly, bringing his
benefit up to 15s. As on the U.A.B., a quarter of a married man's dole is
regarded as rent. Thus in the typical family considered above the total
income would be 33s. a week, a quarter of this being regarded as rent. In
addition, in most districts a coal allowance of 1s. 6d. a week (1s. 6d. is
equivalent to about a hundredweight of coal) is granted for six weeks
before and six weeks after Christmas.

It will be seen that the income of a family on the dole normally
averages round about thirty shillings a week. One can write at least a
quarter of this off as rent, which is to say that the average person, child
or adult, has got to be fed, clothed, warmed, and otherwise cared-for for
six or seven shillings a week. Enormous groups of people, probably at least
a third of the whole population of the industrial areas, are living at this
level. The Means Test is very strictly enforced, and you are liable to be
refused relief at the slightest hint that you are getting mon