A portrait of poverty in bombed out Britain
ON A cold night in South Yorkshire in 1934, an 11-year-old boy called Derek Happs peered anxiously out of his front door as three men carried his semi-conscious older brother, Dennis, down the cobbled street from the mine.
‘It were a rock fall, a real bad ’un,’ explained Josh, a boy only a year or two older than Derek, but in a workman’s belt, braces and boots.
‘We’ll need to fetch the doctor,’ said Derek’s mother. The NHS would not be founded for another 14 years, but the family had kept up payments to the doctor who came around every Friday collecting money as a kind of medical insurance.
Derek felt a lurch of fear his brother would die and his struggling family would lose the young miner’s meagre but essential wages.
There was no welfare state back then, and no compensation for injuries at work. The Great Depression had left two million unemployed.
But despite their extreme hardship, Derek’s father found the money to send him to grammar school. The lad qualified as a pharmacist and worked his way up the ladder at Boots to become a director. He was proud to dispense the first NHS prescription in Nottingham in 1950. Derek’s blue- to-white- collar transformation is one of six moving, real-life stories in this surprisingly gripping slice of social history by psychologist Corinne Sweet. At a time when most workingclass kids had few opportunities for self-improvement, she focuses on men and women born between 1923 and 1947 who all left school early to help keep their families afloat. They all worked in the Midlands for companies such as Boots, Players and Raleigh. Pauline Braker was top of her class, but her father refused to let her go to grammar school. ‘Yer’ll do real work like the rest of us,’ sneered the domineering Raleigh engineer. ‘Yer getting above yersel’, yer are. Yer all kippers and curtains.’
Betty Nichols had lost both her father (to pneumonia, the year penicillin was discovered) and her beloved stepfather (to typhoid) before she hit her teens, and was sent to ‘do ’emming’ at the Cellular Clothing Co when she was 14. ‘No talking, no drinking, no eating at yer machine,’ barked her overseer. ‘No breaks, no going t’lavvy and just half an hour fer yer dinner.’
She would go on to sew up to 40 Army and RAF shirts a day during the war, daydreaming about Clark Gable in Gone With The Wind.
Sweet conveys the exhilaration of first love when Betty met Arthur in his Navy uniform. They married in 1947 and she smuggled ginger pop into work to quell morning sickness. But the baby was stillborn and, like her mother before her, she outlived two husbands.
Betty punched in at Nottingham’s ‘ dark Satanic mills’ all her working life. She turned 90 in 2016. The loss of her child ‘cast a long shadow over her life’, writes Sweet.
It’s hard to imagine the poverty experienced in gas-lit, unheated, bombed-out Britain.
But it’s worth remembering what pulled the Happs family through life in the Thirties: ‘Community, sacrifice, love and tolerance.’