Poverty in Britain, 1900-1965

Ian Gazeley

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781350317284
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

How was poverty measured and defined, and how has this influenced our judgement of the change in poverty in Britain during the first sixty years of the twentieth century? During this period, a large number of poverty surveys were carried out, the methods of which altered after World War II. Commencing with Rowntree's social survey of York in 1899 and ending with Abel-Smith and Townsend's Poor and the Poorest in 1965, Ian Gazeley shows how the means of evaluation and the causes of poverty changed. Poverty in Britain, 1900-1965:
- Offers a comprehensive empirical assessment of all published poverty and nutritional enquiries in this era
- Reports the results of recent re-examinations of many of the more famous social surveys that took place
- Considers the results of these surveys within the context of changing real incomes, the occupational structure and social provision
- Evaluates the extent to which the reduction in poverty was due to the actions of the State or to increases in real income (including more continuous income from fuller employment) Detailed yet easy to follow, Ian Gazeley's book is an indispensable guide to the changing face of poverty in Britain during the first six decades of the last century.

1

VICTORIAN LEGACY

Introduction

At the beginning of the twentieth century Britain was easily still the richest country in Europe, as measured by per capita income, and wage earners’ income had been rising steadily for at least a generation.²⁵ Although historians have debated the impact of industrialisation on the well-being of the population at length during the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century, there has been relatively little disagreement about working-class living standards in the period between 1870 and 1914. It is tempting to believe that the explanation for the general consensus of opinion is simply that the quantitative indicators of workers’ living standards, and specifically the real wage series, suggest that there was unquestionable improvement in the standard of life for most people.

But set against the background of real wage amelioration, there is a considerable body of contemporary evidence that indicates that the poorest sections of Victorian society were experiencing serious impoverishment and destitution. The results of pioneer social investigators’ research are rehearsed in all textbooks, yet the impression given by Booth or Rowntree’s findings that a constant 30 per cent of the population of London and York were in poverty, rests uneasily juxtaposed with the evidence on the behaviour of average real wages, as Ashworth was to note:

‘The great Victorian Boom’, ‘the good years’, and even more gilded labels have been attached to the third quarter of the nineteenth century. But then even a summary account has to move forward only a very few years, recognise that a falling cost of living was easing the condition of the masses, and yet draw attention to ‘the submerged tenth’ (or larger fraction) and refer to the hundreds of thousands living ‘below the poverty line’, i.e. without the means to buy enough necessities to keep themselves physically healthy.²⁶

The aim of this chapter is to consider the extent to which progress did, in fact, encompass groups at the bottom of the earnings distribution: specifically, urban labourers and agricultural workers. There were a number of investigations of poverty carried out in Britain prior to the Great War, although Rowntree’s is far the best known. His investigation of poverty in York at the turn of the century is central to this narrative for two reasons. First, Rowntree’s application of a poverty line, which he used to determine the numbers in York without the income necessary to purchase basic needs, had a dramatic influence on most subsequent empirical investigation of poverty for over half a century. Bowley modified Rowntree’s poverty line measure, and nearly all investigations of poverty in the interwar period apply Bowley’s standard, with little or no further modification, but it was Rowntree who was responsible for devising the method. Second, any attempt to resolve the apparent paradox noted by Ashworth requires a critical evaluation of the findings of pre-war poverty surveys. These investigations also reveal important facts about the nature and causes of poverty in Britain, which will be considered in Chapter 2.

1.1 Occupational Class

Before we examine the behaviour of real incomes, it is necessary to consider the extent of class stratification in Britain before the First World War. At the time of the 1911 population census, there were just over 12.9 million men and 5.4 million women ‘economically active’. As Table 1.1 shows, based on the Goldthorpe class classification, the vast majority of these men and women were in manual occupations: 73.6 per cent of all ‘economically active’ men and 76.7 per cent of all ‘economically active’ women were so defined.²⁷ While there is good reason to believe that the original census returns that Goldthorpe based his classification upon underestimate female employment in 1911, these figures serve as a rough guide to the relative size of the working class in Britain in the period before the First World War. They indicate that the manual working class was about 75 per cent of the economically active population.²⁸ From Table 1.1, it can be seen that 11.5 per cent of economically active men and about 5.1 per cent of women were in unskilled manual occupations. A further 29.1 per cent of economically active men, and 47 per cent of women, were in semi-skilled manual work, and about one-third of all men and one-quarter of economically active women were employed in skilled manual work. The vast majority of manual workers, therefore, worked in an occupation requiring the application of a skill of one sort or another.

Table 1.1 Distribution of economically active population in 1911

	Males	Females
Self-employed and higher-grade professionals	1.5
Employers and proprietors	7.7	4.3
Administrators and managers	3.9	2.3
Lower-grade salaried professionals and technicians	1.4	5.8
Inspectors, supervisors and foremen	1.8	0.2
Clerical workers	5.1	3.3
Sales personnel and shop assistants	5.0	6.4
Skilled manual workers	33.0	24.6
Semi-skilled manual workers	29.1	47.0
Unskilled manual workers	11.5	5.1
Total	100	100

Source: A. H. Halsey, Change in British, Society, 4th edn (1995), Table 2.1, pp. 40–1.

Depending on family size, the condition of the local labour market and life cycle stage, some of the families with adults in these occupational classes would have been regarded by contemporaries as being in ‘poverty’. Exactly what they might have meant by this description, we will come to in a moment, but at this stage it is also important to remember that there were other groups of people, who were not ‘economically active’, who might also have been regarded as being in ‘poverty’ by contemporaries. The most obvious would be found among the elderly, many of whom would no longer be part of the formal labour market as enumerated by census returns. About 5 per cent of the population of England and Wales were over 65 years old, the majority of which were female. According to the Hamilton Committee’s findings in 1900, the proportion of old people in rural areas was typically greater than in urban areas. Relatives or friends maintained fewer than one in five old people. Two out of five men and nearly one-half of all old women claimed to have an income of less than 10 shillings per week, and just over 15 per cent of men and a little more than 27 per cent of women were, or had been, in receipt of poor relief.²⁹ In total, there were nearly 0.89 million people receiving poor relief in 1911, either in workhouses or in the form of outdoor relief from their parish, a significant proportion of whom were elderly.³⁰

1.2 State Provision

As a last resort, it was possible to seek assistance from the parish under the poor law, but help from an official agency was testimony to desperation. Citizens were expected to make provision for their own needs and those that were unable to do so survived with help from families and neighbours or from charity afforded by the better off. According to Fraser, the social philosophy of Victorian Britain was based upon ‘four great tenets: work, thrift, respectability and above all self-help’.³¹ Although philanthropy and voluntarism were increasingly important for providing assistance to the Victorian poor, preventing many from experiencing the degradation of the workhouse, for most philanthropists the real purpose of charity was to try and engineer the moral improvement of the poor. The Charity Organisation Society (COS), which was founded in 1869, is a good example. Although the COS tried to assist those that could become independent, and pioneered casework methods, its early leaders were ‘rigorously traditional’ and the COS was ‘one of the staunchest defenders of the self-help individualist ethic’.³² As much as this type of philanthropic activity was important in purely monetary terms, it would be wrong to think of transfers as being entirely from rich to poor. The poor also helped each other, on the basis that they might themselves rely upon similar help. The part played by work...