Reading "Road to Wiggan Pier" again. Picked it up cause' my friend was saying how much worse it is to live/work now, compared to "back in the day". Despite being full of relatable similarities to the current day, I found this particular excerpt at the beginning especially relevant.
>Joe, like the Scotchman, was a great reader of newspapers and spent almost his entire day in the public library. He was the typical unmarried unemployed man, a derelict-looking, frankly ragged creature with a round, almost childish face on which there was a naively naughty expression. He looked more like a neglected little boy than a grown-up man. I suppose it is the complete lack of responsibility that makes so many of these men look younger than their ages. From Joe's appearance I took him to be about twenty-eight, and was amazed to learn that he was forty-three. He had a love of resounding phrases and was very proud of the astuteness with which he had avoided getting married. He often said to me, 'Matrimonial chains is a big item,' evidently feeling this to be a very subtle and portentous remark. His total income was fifteen shillings a week, and he paid out six or seven to the Brookers for his bed. I sometimes used to see him making himself a cup of tea over the kitchen fire, but for the rest he got his meals somewhere out of doors; it was mostly slices of bread-and-marg and packets of fish and chips, I suppose.
I guess NEET's, Virgin's, Simp's and Neckbeard's still existed. Rather than congregating online they had Newspapers to shitpost and public libraries for voyeur porn/live arguments.
"Before I had been in the coal areas I shared the wide-spread illusion that miners are comparatively well paid. One hears it loosely stated that a miner is paid ten or eleven shillings a shift, and one does a small multiplication sum and concludes that every miner is earning round about L2 a week or L150 a year. But the statement that a miner receives ten or eleven shillings a shift is very misleading. To begin with, it is only the actual coal 'getter' who is paid at this rate; a 'dataller', for instance, who attends to the roofing, is paid at a lower rate, usually eight or nine shillings a shift. Again, when the coal 'getter' is paid piecework, so much per ton extracted, as is the case in many mines, he is dependent on the quality of the coal; a breakdown in the machinery or a 'fault'--that is, a streak of rock running through the coal seam--may rob him of his earnings for a day or two at a time. But in any case one ought not to think of the miner as working six days a week, fifty-two weeks a year. Almost certainly there will be a number of days when he is' laid off'. The average earning per shift worked for every mine-worker, of all ages and both sexes in Great Britain in 1934, was 9s. 1 3/4d. [From the Colliery Tear Book and Coal Trades Directory for 1935.] If everyone were in work all the time, this would mean that the mine-worker was earning a little over L142 a year, or nearly L2 15s. a week. His real income, however, is far lower than this, for the 9s. 1 3/4d. is merely an average calculation on shifts actually worked and takes no account of blank days.'
Sounds alot like when I almost got talked into going into the oil patch in back when it was booming, right out of highschool, only The AVERAGE salary for a miner in the 1930's would have been around 150 Euro per year...At least thats what your drunk miner buddy tells you at the pub, likely trying to convince you to come work. Today that would be £10,446.89 per year...
Another thing my friend was claiming, is that its impossible for him (university educated) to afford a house now a days. He said the further back you go the better things got, that everyone could afford a nice house with a 1 adult income. Leaving the wife free to care for the kids, with no need to pursue a career outside the home.
'Housing shortage' is a phrase that has been bandied about pretty freely since the war, but it means very little to anyone with an income of more than L10 a week, or even L5 a week for that matter. Where rents are high the difficulty is not to find houses but to find tenants. Walk down any street in Mayfair and you will see 'To Let' boards in half the windows. But in the industrial areas the mere difficulty of getting hold of a house is one of the worst aggravations of poverty. It means that people will put up with anything--any hole and corner slum, any misery of bugs and rotting floors and cracking walls, any extortion of skinflint landlords and blackmailing agents--simply to get a roof over their heads. I have been into appalling houses, houses in which I would not live a week if you paid me, and found that the tenants had been there twenty and thirty years and only hoped they might have the luck to die there.
Contd: In general these conditions are taken as a matter of course, though not always. Some people hardly seem to realize that such things as decent houses exist and look on bugs and leaking roofs as acts of God; others rail bitterly against their landlords; but all cling desperately to their houses lest worse should befall. So long as the housing shortage continues the local authorities cannot do much to make existing houses more livable. They can 'condemn' a house, but they cannot order it to be pulled down till the tenant has another house to go to; and so the condemned houses remain standing and are all the worse for being condemned, because naturally the landlord will not spend more than he can help on a house which is going to be demolished sooner or later. In a town like Wigan, for instance, there are over two thousand houses standing which have been condemned for years, and whole sections of the town would be condemned en bloc if there were any hope of other houses being built to replace them. Towns like Leeds and Sheffield have scores of thousands of 'back to back' houses which are all of a condemned type but will remain standing for decades.
Thanks OP, interesting read, might pick up the book myself
Luke Gomez
>in the 1930' This lil nigga really went back to great depression to find an example of worse times than today lmao 😆
Jaxon Thompson
Stop spamming every fucking thread, there is a /dbg/ that's where you belong
Liam Stewart
Good stuff user. You should take a look at "A Fortunate Life" by AB Facey, the memoir of an Australian who was born in 1894 and was basically sold to cattle rustlers as cheap labour at 8 years old. Hardship on a level that is almost incomprehensible in this day and age.
Dominic Sullivan
Thanks man...yeah so here is a few differnt housing options.
1. House in Beech Hill Estate.
Downstairs. Large living-room with kitchener fireplace, cup-boards, and fixed dresser, composition floor. Small hallway, largish kitchen. Up to date electric cooker hired from Corporation at much the same rate as a gas cooker.
Upstairs. Two largish bedrooms, one tiny one--suitable only for a boxroom or temporary bedroom. Bathroom, w.c., with hot and cold water.
Smallish garden. These vary throughout the estate, but mostly rather smaller than an allotment.
Four in family, parents and two children. Husband in good employ. Houses appear well built and are quite agreeable to look at. Various restrictions, e.g. it is forbidden to keep poultry or pigeons, take in lodgers, sub-let, or start any kind of business with-out leave from the Corporation. (This is easily granted in the case of taking in lodgers, but not in any of the others.) Tenant' very well satisfied with house and proud of it. Houses in this estate all well kept. Corporation are good about repairs, but keep tenants up to the mark with regard to keeping the place tidy, etc.
Rent 11s. 3d. including rates. Bus fare into town 2d.
Downstairs. Living-room 14 ft by 10 ft, kitchen a good deal smaller, tiny larder under stairs, small but fairly good bathroom. Gas cooker, electric lighting. Outdoor w.c.
Upstairs. One bedroom 12 ft by 10 ft with tiny fireplace, another the same size without fireplace, another 7 ft by 6 ft. Best bedroom has small wardrobe let into wall. 'Garden about 20 yards by 10.
Six in family, parents and four children, eldest son nineteen, eldest daughter twenty-two. None in work except eldest son. Tenants very discontented. Their complaints are: 'House is cold, draughty, and damp. Fireplace in living-room gives out no heat and makes room very dusty-- attributed to its being set too low. Fireplace in best bedroom too small to be of any use. Walls upstairs cracking. Owing to uselessness of tiny bedroom, five are sleeping in one bedroom, one (the eldest son) in the other.'
Gardens in this estate all neglected.
Rent 10s. 3d., inclusive. Distance to town a little over a mile-- there is no bus here.
>Keep in mind you would only be earning 12.5 pounds per month if you were doing well.
>Not too sure but I think there are 15 (22 exactly) shillings to a pound, and 12 pence (d) to a shilling. I am not a brit (North American) so this system of currency if foregin to me
>Hardship on a level that is almost incomprehensible in this day and age. Half of it is overexagerated souvenirs. It's like when you ask a boomer how it was when he was young and his description almost matches the living standard of a POW in Roman's mines of salt.
Lucas Barnes
Welfare queens where also a thing
I could multiply examples, but these two are enough, as the types of Corporation houses being built do not vary greatly from place to place. Two things are immediately obvious. The first is that at their very worst the Corporation houses are better than the slums they replace. The mere possession of a bathroom and a bit of garden would out-weigh almost any disadvantage. The other is that they are much more expensive to live in. It is common enough for a man to be turned out of a condemned house where he is paying six or seven shillings a week and given a Corporation house where he has to pay ten. This only affects those who are in work or have recently been in work, because when a man is on the P.A.C. his rent is assessed at a quarter of his dole, and if it is more than this he gets an extra allowance
>From Joe's appearance I took him to be about twenty-eight, and was amazed to learn that he was forty-three. this is why i cant be a wageslave you just destroy your body and people think its normal
Matthew Reed
And gentrification of the inner city and hoodification of suburbs, along with other tidbits that cannot help but remind one of problems of today.
And again there is the expense, especially for a man in work, of getting to and from town. This last is one of the more obvious problems of rehousing. Slum clearance means diffusion of the population. When you rebuild on a large scale, what you do in effect is to scoop out the centre of the town and redistribute it on the outskirts. This is all very well in a way; you have got the people out of fetid alleys into places where they have room to breathe; but from the point of view of the people themselves, what you have done is to pick them up and dump them down five miles from their work. The simplest solution is flats. If people are going to live in large towns at all they must learn to live on top of one another. But the northern working people do not take kindly to flats; even where fiats exist they are contemptuously named 'tenements'. Almost everyone will tell you that he 'wants a house of his own', and apparently a house in the middle of an unbroken block of houses a hundred yards long seems to them more 'their own' than a flat situated in mid-air.
I cannot help but feel like my generation is suffering slightly from a sense of dis-enfranchisement from the system, and an apathy towards the future. Especially people in a certain demographic (Young white males)
As I said earlier, the English working class do not show much capacity for leadership, but they have a wonderful talent for organization. The whole trade union movement testifies to this; so do the excellent working-men's clubs--really a sort of glorified cooperative pub, and splendidly organized--which are so common in Yorkshire. In many towns the N.U.W.M. have shelters and arrange speeches by Communist speakers. But even at these shelters the men who go there do nothing but sit round the stove and occasionally play a game of dominoes. If this move-met could be combined with something along the lines of the occupational centres, it would be nearer what is needed. It is a deadly thing to see a skilled man running to seed, year after year, in utter, hopeless idleness. It ought not to be impossible to give him the chance of using his hands and making furniture and so forth for his own home, with-out turning him into a Y.M.C.A. cocoa- drunkard. We may as well face the fact that several million men in England will--unless another war breaks out--never have a real job this side the grave. One thing that probably could be done and certainly ought to be done as a matter of course is to give every unemployed man a patch of ground and free tools if he chose to apply for them. It is disgraceful that men who are expected to keep alive on the P.A.C. should not even have the chance to grow vegetables for their families.
Lol kek comparing how great we have it now to the Great Depression. My thoughts exactly user.
Jaxon Perez
>society had already reached the point where there were too many people and not enough work to do its crazy how the advent of the internet etc has managed to create such an insane volume of really pointless busywork and in spite of everything working 8+ hours a day is still the typical norm instead of breaking down labour and spreading it more evenly
Blake Gray
When people live on the dole for years at a time they grow used to it, and drawing the dole, though it remains unpleasant, ceases to be shameful. Thus the old, independent, workhouse-fearing tradition is undermined, just as the ancient fear of debt is undermined by the hire-purchase system. In the back streets of Wigan and Barnsley I saw every kind of privation, but I probably saw much less conscious misery than I should have seen ten years ago. The people have at any rate grasped that unemployment is a thing they cannot help. It is not only Alf Smith who is out of work now; Bert Jones is out of work as well, and both of them have been 'out' for years. It makes a great deal of difference when things are the same for everybody.
We arent quite there yet, at least here in Canada. Our economy is actually doing quite well now that covid is over, in my trade (Welder) we are going through a bit of a boom. Yet I hear quite a few of both Uni educated and "trade" (roofers ect) workers around my age (20's) say "there are NO jobs rn, Especially ones that pay a LIVING WAGE, I mean, I make 500 dollars a weekend in tips as a server, but I cant afford a house (1 mil they will quote) on that"
Shit man I'm too lazy to check but this aint actually all that bad for UN-employment insurance either lol
When a man is first unemployed, until his insurance stamps are exhausted, he draws 'full benefit', of which the rates are as follows:
per week
Single man 17s. Wife 9s. Each child below 14 3s.
Thus in a typical family of parents and three children of whom one was over fourteen, the total income would be 32s. per week, plus anything that might be earned by the eldest child. When a man's stamps are exhausted, before being turned over to the P.A.C. (Public Assistance Committee), he receives twenty-six weeks' 'transitional benefit' from the U.A.B. (Unemployment Assistance Board), the rates being as follows: per week
Single man 15s. Man and wife 24s. Children 14-18 6s. Children 11-14 4s. 6d. Children 8-11 4s. Children 5-8 3s. 6d. Children 3-5 3s.
Thus on the U.A.B. the income of the typical family of five persons would be 37s. 6d. a week if no child was in work. When a man is on the U.A.B. a quarter of his dole is regarded as rent, with a minimum of 7s. 6d. a week. If the rent he is paying is more than a quarter of his dole he receives an extra allowance, but if it is less than 7s. 6d., a corresponding amount is deducted. Payments on the P.A.C. theoretically comes out of the local rates, but are backed by a central fund. The rates of benefit are:
per week
Single man 12s. 6d. Man and wife 23s. Eldest child 4s. Any other child 3s.
Yeah its a good one. I really like Down and Out in Paris and London. Almost more in fact...
Will do once I get the time. My book stack is already large, but I got this one written down on a sticky note and put it on a book I gotta return to the library (good habit to remember what you wanna pick up)
I dont browse on Any Forums much, I just thought maybe this would be the place to share it...What are your guys opinion on the current state of affairs?
Jonathan James
It seems once again soi-boys are in fact eternal. It could be this decline HAS started with WW1 and we have beeen feeling the effects ever since!
Where are the monstrous men with chests like barrels and moustaches like the wings of eagles who strode across my child-hood's gaze twenty or thirty years ago? Buried, I suppose, in the Flanders mud. In their place there are these pale-faced boys who have been picked for their height and consequently look like hop-poles in overcoats--the truth being that in modern England a man over six feet high is usually skin and bone and not much else. If the English physique has declined, this is no doubt partly due to the fact that the Great War carefully selected the million best men in England and slaughtered them, largely before they had had time to breed. But the process must have begun earlier than that, and it must be due ultimately to un-healthy ways of living, i.e. to industrialism. I don't mean 'the habit of living in towns--probably the town is healthier than the country, in many ways--but the modern industrial technique which provides you with cheap substitutes for everything. We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine gun.
It is unfortunate that the English working class--the English nation generally, for that matter--are exception-ally ignorant about and wasteful of food. I have pointed out elsewhere how civilized is a French navvy's idea of a meal compared with an Englishman's, and I cannot believe that you would ever see such wastage in a French house as you habitually see in English ones. Of course, in the very poorest homes, where everybody is unemployed, you don't see much actual waste, but those who can afford to waste food often do so. I could give startling instances of this. Even the Northern habit of baking one's own bread is slightly wasteful in itself, because an overworked woman cannot bake more than once or, at most, twice a week and it is impossible to tell beforehand how much bread will be wasted, so that a certain amount generally has to be thrown away. The usual thing is to bake six large loaves and twelve small ones at a time. All this is part of the old, generous English attitude to life, and it is an amiable quality, but a disastrous one at the present moment.
