Glasgow suffers as rate of unemployment hits 70%
IN cha r t i n g t he Gre at Depression and its effects on Glasgow and the surrounding areas, I have shown how the RMS Queen Mary became the symbol of the industrial decline on Clydeside, and how the National Government under Ramsay MacDonald was forced to intervene with state aid to have the great ship launched in 1934.
There is no doubt a great irony in the fact that as soon as she was launched, work began on completing the Queen Mary’s upper decks and inner fittings, and as Cunard White Star intended, she was finished in 1936 as the most luxurious liner afloat – all this achieved in the midst of the Great Depression. But then she was only ever intended to be the vehicle of the monied classes.
The workers were just glad to be earning a wage, meagre though it was, and across Glasgow multiple workshops took part in the extraordinary process of giving the Queen sumptuous fittings while the engines and other steelwork were simply of the highest class.
Still the city suffered the ravages of unemployment and lack of investment in both factories and workers. The human cost was horrendous and I am aware that I have not fully described what happened to the people of Glasgow in the early to mid- 1930s.
Perhaps it is time then, to turn to a poet for a description which I read years ago in his book Scottish Journey.
The power of Edwin Muir’s poetry and prose has stayed with me all my life, and the Orcadian who moved to Glasgow at the age of nine certainly struck a note with his memories of the city – he lost both his parents to illness in the city and endured a miserable few years as a clerk before he was able to escape and become the writer he always wanted to be.
He revisited Glasgow in 1933 and recorded his impressions of the Slump- hit city in his book published two years later.
Professor TC Snout quotes Muir’s Glasgow experience in his book A Century of the Scottish People: “In Glasgow he revisited the old shipbuilding office where he had worked for several years as a clerical assistant: in place of 12 fellow clerks he found six, and those on half- time and half- pay. Outside the workforce stood in the street.”
Muir wrote: “The weather had been good for several weeks and all the men I saw were tanned and brown, as if they had just come back from their summer holidays.
“They were standing in their usual groups, or walking by twos and threes, slowly, for one felt as one looked on them that the world had not a single message to send them on, and that for them to hasten their steps would have meant a sort of madness.
“Perhaps at some time the mirage of work glimmered at the extreme horizon of their minds; but one could see by looking at them that they were no longer deceived by such false pictures.”
Vivid, evocative stuff, and in a 1936 survey on Disinherited Youth, the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust saw that the effects of unemployment were still devastating for workers who had gotten used to long periods of being out of work: “They had longer and more frequently occurring experiences of unemployment.
“With drooping shoulders and slouching feet they moved as a defeated and dispirited army. They gave their names, signed the necessary forms and shuffled out.
“This, twice a week, was the only disciplined routine with which they had to comply.”
At its worst, unemployment in some parts of the city soared to almost 70%, while across Scotland as a whole in 1933, a quarter of the workforce were out of a job, compared to a fifth of the workforce across the UK.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries skilled workers in Glasgow had an escape route – emigration, either to England, the USA, Canada or the Empire countries.
But all these populations suffered in the Great Depression and while some Glaswegians were able to move down south or abroad, the vast majority had to stay in the city and endure the almost unendurable.
That included ill health on a massive scale. As if it ever needed proving, the fact that life expectancy was considerably less for the working class than it was for the middle class was the evidence for what we now would call ‘ health inequalities’ – and in the 1930s there was no National Health Service and no Welfare State as we know it.
Glasgow’s dependence on heavy industry such as shipbuilding had been the making of the Second City but by 1935 it was clear that there would be no going back to the golden days of full order books in every shipyard and factories at full production for everything from locomotives to tobacco goods.
They moved as a defeated and dispirited army
Or was it so clear? In 1931 the National Government had maintained that it would not be rearming Britain. Over in Germany and Italy and far away in Japan, some very nasty men changed all that.
Just as it looked as if the Great Depression would become permanent for Glasgow and the Clyde, the Government changed its policies and that led directly to Glasgow’s recovery from 1935- 36 onwards.
It is too banal to say that Adolf Hitler brought about economic recovery for many parts of the UK such as Glasgow, not least because the trigger for rearmament was the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931.
The Admiralty needed new ships and pointed out that Japan was now a direct threat to British possessions in the Far East such as Hong Kong and Singapore, and in March 1932, the UK Cabinet decided to go for rearmament, a process that accelerated with the arrival of Hitler as Germany’s Fuhrer a year later.
It took a few years for Glasgow to really benefit but by 1937, shipyards were reopening and engineering works hummed with the noise of machinery again.
That year also saw the establishment of an industrial estate where one of the key engines of the Second World War was produced – the Rolls- Royce Merlin so indelibly associated with Hillington.
It took many years for Glasgow to fully recover, and part of that was due to the image it gained in the 1920s and 30s. Next week I’ll examine No Mean City.