A 1930s FAMILY OF TEN LIVED ON JUST £3.60 A WEEK
THE subject of how the women of Bolton made ends meet in challenging financial times was of enduring fascination to Harrisson and his team.
As researchers scrutinised the town’s shopping habits, housewives took them into their confidence, inviting them into their homes and giving them detailed breakdowns of the family finances.
The grinding poverty they found there astonished the well-to-do observers.
In one house it was reported that ten people lived there — a man, a woman and eight children — four boys and four girls. The only income came from the man, whose weekly wages were £2 17s 6d (around £2.87) and from the oldest boy, who earned 14/9d (74p) — a total of £3 12s 3d (£3.61).
The mother gave volunteers a breakdown of their weekly outgoings. ‘Rent 10/6d: Coal 3/6d — sometimes it’s more. Lighting is 1/6d a week.
‘I get four to five loaves of bread every day — they’re five pence each.’
The observer asked about butter. ‘Oh we never see butter in this house. I get six pounds of marge at 5d. When I went into hospital to have my last child it was the first time I’d tasted butter for three years. I don’t buy meat except perhaps a bit of mince.’
Her husband, she said, had one suit, one pair of shoes, three sets of work clothes and clogs. ‘Sometimes I buy him a new collar an’ tie.’ With regard to her own clothes: ‘I’ve got this dress — an’ another old one. I have one coat that’s worth wearing — I got from the minister’s wife — it’s black and that’s a good colour.
‘Also I’ve a change of underclothes — mind it’s just a change — an’ when I get them given they got to be altered — an’ I keeps on washin’ them.
‘Sometimes I buy some stockings for 6d at Woolworth’s — I got a good bargain t’other day off the ragcart, three pairs of shoes for 6d. I gave one pair to the woman further up.’
Time and again the heroism of families living in such poverty is recorded. ‘In one house an unfortunate mother was nursing her baby in a room — kept beautifully clean — which had once been a scullery,’ an observer noted. ‘A dismal procession of men and women passed through to the common sanitary convenience outside.
‘In another case, a stream of liquid, resulting from the overflow of defective pails, reached to the door of the house and settled there. Pail closets were not, in many cases, emptied nearly often enough.
‘We have seen houses overrun with vermin, and heard pitiable stories of weekly expenditure upon disinfectants, which meant deprivation of food.
‘In one such house we saw a child seriously ill with pneumonia in a bed in the kitchen, through the wainscoting of which rats made a nightly invasion.
‘The lives of these people are robbed of decency, dignity and privacy even in the sacred intimacies of birth and death, yet their heroism is marvellous.’