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MALCOLM CHASE Unemployment without Protest: The Ironstone Mining Communities of East Cleveland in the Inter-war Period in MATTHIAS REISS AND MATT PERRY (eds.), Unemployment and Protest: New Perspectives on Two Centuries of Contention (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) pp. 265–282 ISBN: 978 0 199 59573 0 The following PDF is published under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND licence. Anyone may freely read, download, distribute, and make the work available to the public in printed or electronic form provided that appropriate credit is given. However, no commercial use is allowed and the work may not be altered or transformed, or serve as the basis for a derivative work. The publication rights for this volume have formally reverted from Oxford University Press to the German Historical Institute London. All reasonable effort has been made to contact any further copyright holders in this volume. Any objections to this material being published online under open access should be addressed to the German Historical Institute London. DOI: 11 Unemployment without Protest: The Ironstone Mining Communities of East Cleveland in the Inter-war Period MALCOLM CHASE This is a study of absences. It treats an area of Britain-East Cleveland (on the North Yorkshire coast between Teesside and Whitby)-almost totally absent from histories of the inter-war period. 1 And it considers an occupational group-ironstone miners-that are largely ignored by labour historians. 2 More par- ticularly, however, this essay is about the absence of protest by the unemployed. A failure to protest was arguably the norm among British unemployed workers in the inter-war period. As well as seeking to fill geographical and occupational lacunae in our knowledge of inter-war unemployment, this study will there- fore develop some tentative conclusions that may contribute to an understanding of the circumstances in which protest does not happen. On the face of it, it is strange that the histories of inter-war Britain and its unemployed have ignored East Cleveland. At the beginning of 1930, Cleveland's ironstone mines employed 4,271 workers; by the winter of 1932-3, the workforce had shrunk to 1,253. The eastern part of the district was particularly affected, its two Labour Exchange districts recording unemployment figures (for workers registered under the National Insurance scheme) that 1 A neglect all the sharper given the extensive study of neighbouring Teesside in the period, see Kate Nicholas, The Social Effects of Unemployment on Teesside, 1919-39(Manchester, 1986). 2 The only works of substance on the Cleveland ironstone mining district are: Anthony Nicholson, 'Common Ground: The Dynamics of Mutuality in the Cleveland Ironstone Field, 185o-1914' (Ph.D. thesis, CNAA, Teesside Polytechnic, 1988); and Margaret Williamson, '"The Iron Chancellors": The Dynamics of the Domestic Economy in Ironstone-Mining Households, 19I8-1g64', Journal ofFamily History, 28/3 (July 2003), 391-410. MALCOLM CHASE nudged go per cent. 3 The extent and depth of poverty in these 'most sordid little villages, each so harsh and depressing', appalled visitors from southern England. 4 Michael Tippett was among them. For him the experience was politically formative, encapsu- lated in the recollection of hiking with a friend through the area, and stopping 'for a picnic of bread and cheese and apples when some children, covered with sores, appeared from nowhere, picked up the breadcrumbs, grabbed the apple cores and ran off eating them'.5 When in June 1934, the Manchester Guardian ran a series of articles titled 'Blackspots ofUnemployment', it chose to illustrate Yorkshire through one of the mining villages of East Cleveland, Boos beck. The article focused on a small terrace, two-thirds of the adult male residents of which were without employment. Of the seven who had jobs, one was a hawker and two-a grim irony-were assis- tant relieving officers based at the Loftus Labour Exchange.6 No women in the terrace had waged work. Historically the area had offered little opportunity for female waged labour and the erosion of the male breadwinner ideal, wrought by mass unemployment, profoundly affected community relations. East Cleveland exhibited all the characteristic features of 'outer Britain' in the 1930s: struc- tural long-term unemployment, especially among older males, forlorn hopes of recovery, and disinclination to disrupt kinship ties by migrating in search of work. 7 Diet was severely deficient, 'the principal foodstuffs are potatoes, bread, and margarine', reported the Guardian. However, in six of the fifteen households surveyed by the newspaper, access to an allotment mitigated poverty. 'These allotments not only provide a fair supply of vegetables but also give their owners something to do.' The concept of 'an economy of makeshifts', generally applied to survival strategies of the early modern and nineteenth-century poor, is no less apposite in the context of East Cleveland in the 1930s.8 3 Ministry of Labour Gazette, 38/2 (Feb. 1930) and 41/1 (Jan. 1933); Michael McCann, 'Organised Labour and the Unemployed on Teesside, 1930-36' (MA thesis, CNAA, Teesside Polytechnic, 1985); Malcolm Chase and Mark Whyman, Heartbreak Hill: A Response to Unemployment in East Cleveland in the 1930s (Redcar, 1991), 7· 4 Phyllis Crawford, In England Still (Bristol, 1938), 33-4. 5 Ian Kemp, Tippeu: The Composer and His Music (Oxford, 1987), 30. 6 Manchester Guardian, 9 June I 934. 7 N. F. R. Crafts, 'Long-Term Unemployment in Britain in the 1930s', Economic History Review, 40/3 (1987), 418-32. 8 See particularly Steven King, Poverty and Welfare in England, 1700-1850(London, 2000); Unemployment without Protest Access to the land features very prominently in this study. Within East Cleveland it was at the heart of an organized strategy devised to address the consequences oflong-term unemployment, the Cleveland Unemployed Miners' Association. Nationally, land schemes of one kind or another were a very prominent part of Britain's unemployment coping strategy. 'How undying is the notion that the place for the unemployed is there!', a Welsh reformer commented in 1935. 'Nothing seems to kill it.... It is the persistent consciousness, ineradicably in the heart of the populace, that all renewal of life must come from the soil.' 9 There were three elements to inter-war land schemes. First were traditional local authority and charitable allotments, accessed by the unem- ployed on an ad hoc basis and of the kind the Manchester Guardian found so important in Boosbeck. Second were some thirty-five workcamps for the long-term unemployed, directly run by the Ministry ofLabour between 1929 and 1939. 10 These were deeply unpopular, both because benefits were disallowed to those who refused to attend and because of the morale and energy-sapping disciplinary basis upon which these 'reconditioning centres' were conducted. Absenteeism ran at nearly 25 per cent. 11 The third and most important category of inter-war land schemes was a wide variety of formalized, voluntarily assisted proj- ects, often receiving direct government support. These have received scant attention from historians: they are given half a sen- tence, for example, in the widely cited book by John Stevenson and Chris Cook, 77ze Slump. 12 However, 2,6oo allotment societies were registered in 1936, of which a substantial proportion was run by voluntary occupational centres for the unemployed, often initi- ated by religious bodies, notably the Society of Friends (Quakers). The Quakers also contributed generously to the costs of statutory Steven King and Alannah Tomkins (eds.), The Poor in England 170o-I85o: An Economy of Makeshifts (Manchester, 2003); Samantha Williams, 'Earnings, Poor Relief and the Economy of Makeshifts: Bedfordshire in the Early Years of the New Poor Law', Rural History, I6h (2005), 2I-52. 9 J. W. Scott, Self-Subsistence for the Unemployed: Studies in a New Technique (London, I935), 74. 10 Dave Colledge, Labour Camps: The British Experience (Sheffield, I989);john Field and Dave Colledge, '"To Recondition Human Material": An Account of a British Labour Camp in the 1930s', History Workshop Journal, I5 (I983);john Field, Learning through Labour: Training, Education and the State (Leeds, I992), 44-g9. I I Colledge, Labour Camps, 6, I3. I2 John Stevenson and Chris Cook, The Slump (London, I977), 65. MALCOLM CHASE and charitable allotment holders who were unemployed, making, for example, donations to some 100,000out-of-work men on the principal coalfields in 1928-g. In the same period this initiative was extended to the Derbyshire, Somerset, Forest of Dean, and North Wales coalfields, and to the Cleveland ironstone field. 13 Considerable research would be needed to build up an accurate picture of the extent of the voluntarily assisted land schemes, but it was clearly significant. In the area covered by the south-east Lancashire and north-east Cheshire Regional Advisory Council for Unemployed Workers, for example, there were no less than thirty-two occupational centres with allotment schemes attached in 1936. 14 Nationally, fifty-one schemes were substantial enough to merit detailed treatment in the considerable contemporary lit- erature on the land and the unemployed. Their distribution is informative-west Durham but not east; North, East, and South Yorkshire but not West Yorkshire; and particular concentrations in South Wales and Lancashire (beyond Manchester). 15 The Cleveland Unemployed Miners' Association (CUMA) was one of these schemes. 16 From 1931, the CUMA ran an ambitious land reclamation and cultivation scheme on three sites in the district, adjacent to the pit villages of Boosbeck, Lingdale, and Margrove Park. Its title is deceptive. It was intended to resonate with the name of the iron- stone miners' trade union-the Cleveland Quarrymen and Miners' Association (CQMA). The CQMA was absorbed into the General & Municipal Workers' Union in 1932 but it retained a clear sectional identity. Neither union initiated the land scheme and the CQMA had an uneasy relationship with it.

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