Social Conditions in Britain 1918-1939

Stephen Constantine

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135835811
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

One popular image of the interwar years portrays the period as a time of depression, deprivation and decay. However, much recent work has tended to take, on balance, a more optimistic view of social conditions. In this pamphlet Dr Constantine examines the basis for such conclusions by reviewing the changing employment porspects for manual and non-manual workers, levels of family expenditure on food, consumer goods and leisure activities, the extent and causes of poverty, the quality of interwar housing and the records of the nation's health. The effects on living standards of demographic change, economic growth, wage levels and government policies are considered. The period is seen as a time of transition, witnessing significant shifts away from older patterns of employment and social conditions towards those characteristic of an affulent mass consumer society. However, there were casualties from this process of accelerated change, and class and regional inequalities remained.

Social Conditions in Britain 1918–1939

Introduction

It is difficult for the student of interwar Britain not to have some preconceptions of the period in mind when tackling the topic of social conditions. The 1920s and 1930s still seem close to us. Impressions of these years are readily recalled by those who lived through them. A wealth of novels, plays and social commentaries first published between the wars are still in print and in wide circulation. The physical remains of the age also survive in, for example, the houses, factories and public buildings constructed at the time. Visual records too exist, richer for this period than for any earlier, thanks to the explosion in the craze for amateur photography and extensions in the techniques of cheap reproduction of photographs in books and newspapers. Moreover, this is an age which still moves before our eyes, in the documentary, newsreel and feature films made between the wars.

Out of this material from the past our impressions of interwar social conditions may unwittingly be formed. In the popular view, these years and especially the 1930s were a time of unbroken depression, deprivation and decay. It is an image coloured in dark tones, a palette made up of dole queues, hunger marches, slum houses, malnutrition and bitter class and industrial relations. Sometimes these bleak impressions of the past have been consciously and more recently evoked, because the period remains a reference point in many of our own contemporary political arguments. No discussion of unemployment in the 1980s seems complete without a comparison with the depression in the 1930s. The Trades Union Congress once adopted as a campaign cry ‘Forward to the 80s not back to the 30s’.

There are, however, other tantalizing if perhaps subordinate images of interwar Britain in the modern memory which seem difficult to reconcile with a sombre portrait, brighter colours suggesting unprecedented affluence, happier innovations. Photographs suggest a people, even a working class, better dressed than their parents and grandparents before the First World War. New housing estates come to mind, rich with gardens. Between the wars the motor car became common enough to generate traffic jams and to require the building of expensive by-passes. There are impressions of holiday-makers crowding beaches. This appears, too, as the age of the mighty Wurlitzer organ, when cinemas were built as dream palaces in most towns in the country. Interwar Britain gave us the BBC, Henry Hall’s Dance Band, perhaps the birth of ‘pop’ music. There are hints here of rising living standards.

Aware of these elements, historians have for many years been critical of the grim one-sided version of interwar social history. Indeed, some recent work has tended to take on balance a distinctly optimistic view of social conditions, identifying and explaining substantial improvements. It is the purpose of this pamphlet to take note of this research and by analysing some selected major topics to suggest how the realities which lie behind conflicting images of the period may perhaps be reconciled.

Employment and unemployment

It is useful to begin a study of social conditions by an examination of interwar employment history. Work obviously provided most families with the income which determined their standard of living. Working conditions also significantly affected the quality of life of the employed population since they spent so many hours each week at their place of work. Moreover, work provided most people with their status in society, their self-esteem and many of their social contacts. We therefore need to know what the opportunities were for employment between the wars. What mattered was not just whether people were employed or unwillingly unemployed, but also in what occupations people found work and where.

The regular census of population is a good guide, in spite of the unfortunate gap in the sequence caused by the cancellation during the war of the census due to be held in 1941. What we discover are remarkable changes in the occupational distribution of the labour force, that is, in the kind of work people did for a living. Although Britain at the beginning of the twentieth century already had a highly developed economy, this was still a society in which major developments were taking place, and the pace of change accelerated between the wars, substantially affecting opportunities for employment. For example, until the close of the nineteenth century, manual labour had been the blessing or the curse of the vast majority of British workers. Even in 1911 about 13.7m. or 74.6 per cent of the occupied population of Great Britain were manual workers, and the absolute number grew with the rise in population to total 14.8m. manual workers in 1931. But as a percentage of the labour force they declined to 70.3 per cent in 1931 and to 64.2 per cent by 1951. Even by 1939 the labour force had become far less dominated by manual workers than in the past. The expanding group was not made up of independent employers: in the first few decades of the century they remained with about the same share of the occupied population, 6.7 per cent in 1931. The astonishing growth was in the number of white-collar or socalled nonmanual workers. They totalled 3.4m. or 18.7 per cent of the labour force in 1911, 4.8m. or 23.0 per cent in 1931 and 6.9m. or 30.9 per cent in 1951. Already by the end of the 1930s they constituted over a quarter of the labour force.

This expansion of white-collar occupations is characteristic of advanced industrial societies. It reflected an increase in the number of salary-earning industrial managers and top administrators as businesses and central and local government services expanded in size and complexity. It reflected also a shift towards a more scientifically-based industrial technology which required modern companies like Imperial Chemical Industries, formed in 1926, to recruit more technicians. There was an increased need and willingness to pay for the services of professional people like consultant engineers, accountants, doctors and teachers. Large numbers were also joining an expanding retail sector as salesmen and shop assistants, working not only for single businesses but increasingly for the chain stores like Woolworth’s and Marks and Spencer’s. Boots had established 1180 branches by 1938. However, most substantial was the growth in the number of clerks, from 832,000 in 1911 or 4.5 per cent of the labour force to 1,404,000 or 6.7 per cent by 1931 and up to 2,341,000 or 10.4 per cent by 1951. Large bureaucracies were developing in industry and in government, employing large numbers of low-grade administrators, clerical officers and typists. More people found employment in such careers between the wars (7).

There were equally striking changes among the ranks of manual workers. Not only did their numbers decline as a proportion of the labour force, but economic change substantially affected their distribution between different industries. Nineteenth-century Britain had come to be dominated by a handful of major industries, especially coalmining, textiles, iron and steel production and shipbuilding. These industries grew to employ large numbers of workers. But between the wars these Victorian staple industries shrank and in the process shed workers. The number of coalminers employed in the United Kingdom fell from 1,083,000 in 1920 to 675,000 by 1938, cotton workers went down from 534,000 to 302,000, those in iron and steel from 527,000 to 342,000 and in shipbuilding from 282,000 to 129,000. We might also note the continuing decline in employment in an industry once more important than all others: the number of workers in agriculture and forestry fell from 1,661,000 to 1,221,000. But while opportunities declined in some trades, openings for manual workers grew in others. There were expanding industries which recruited additional labour. Companies making motor cars like Morris and Austin shifted to mass production techniques after 1922, and the number of workers in the vehicle industry then grew from 227,000 in 1920 to 516,000 by 1938. The Central Electricity Board was established in 1926, and thereafter the development of the national grid system increased jobs in the making and distribution of electricity. Employment in the public services of electricity, gas and water rose from 185,000 to 291,000. The stimulus of improved electricity supply also helped the expansion in electrical engineering, and the number of workers in the industry went up from 171,000 to 326,000. There were also substantial increases in the number of building workers especially in the 1930s and in the distributive trades. Noticeable, if more modest, additions were made to the number of workers in the chemical, rayon, and food and drink industries. Changes in employment opportunities for manual workers must therefore be seen in terms of redeployment and not simply in terms of decline (6).

These interwar changes in the occupational structure had a particular significance for women. It is true that the number of women going out to work scarcely changed as a proportion of the number of women in the population of working age. The figures are 35.3 per cent in 1911, 34.2 per cent in 1931 and 34.7 per cent in 1951. The percentage of single women working was quite high, but social conventions still strictly limited the employment prospects of married women. Most chose to or had to give up work on marriage. Nevertheless, the actual numbers of women at work did increase from roughly 5.2m. in 1911 to 6.3m. in 1931 and to 7.0m. in 1951. There were also important changes in the kind of work women did. For example, far fewer of them were employed as textile workers, in the clothing trades or in domestic service by the end of the 1930s. Instead many more women had become for the first time firmly established in white-collar occupations, albeit usually in the more humble grades. Their intrusion into shops and offices had been accelerated by the First World War when men were recruited into the forces and women had taken their places (7).

The net effect of these occupational changes was to keep in employment the vast majority of those who explicitly sought work between the wars. This fact must always be remembered when assessing interwar social conditions. The total in civil employment in the United Kingdom was to drop from about 19.5m. in 1920 to 17.4m. in 1921, but it then rose with only a setback in the early 1930s to leave 21.8m. in work by 1939. The National Government had some justification for a complacent announcement in their election manifesto in 1935 that ‘more persons are now employed in this country than ever before in its whole history’.

Nevertheless, against that substantial achievement we must now set the undeniable evidence that levels of unemployment between the wars we...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Foreword
• Social Conditions in Britain 1918–1939
• Select bibliography