Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [147]
In the coal industry, wage increases were much steeper—from an indexed 109 to 222. But these did nothing to stem a relentless decline in production—by 12 percent between 1938 and 1944—which alarmed the government and bewildered the public. The mines employed 766,000 workers in 1939, 709,000 in 1945. Loss of skilled labour from the pits to the services provided an inadequate explanation for the fall in per capita output, since the German coal industry achieved dramatic increases under the same handicap. The official historians wrote later: “one can hardly overstress the effect545 of the Depression years upon the morale of the mining community … many miners … felt a sardonic satisfaction in finding themselves for once able to call the tune. Their attitude was not antisocial. It was only un-social … We have to consider how far these narrowed and embittered men could be expected to respond to inducements wrung from the authorities by the urgency of war.”
In 1944, three million tons of coal production were lost by strikes. A team of American technical experts who studied Britain’s mining industry reported to the government: “The center of the problem … is the bad feeling546 and antagonism which pervade the industry and which manifests itself in low morale, non-cooperation and indifference. In almost every district we visited, miners’ leaders and mine owners complained of men leaving the mines early, failure to clear the faces and voluntary absenteeism.” The Cabinet decided against publishing this report.
Class divisions sustained notable variations in communities’ health. The southeast had prospered economically in the last years before war came, but other regions remained blighted by the Depression. In 1942, while four babies of every thousand born in southeast England died, seven perished in south Wales, the northwest and the northeast. Measles produced four times as many fatalities among children in the latter areas as in the former, and tuberculosis rates were much higher. A 1943 Ministry of Health study found that 10 percent of a sample of six hundred children were ill-nourished: “Many of the people had lived for years past547 in poverty and unemployment, and had given up the struggle to maintain a decent standard of housekeeping and cooking.” The condition of many children evacuated from blitzed cities shocked those who received them. Of 31,000 registered in Newcastle, for instance, 4,000 were deficient in footwear, 6,500 in clothing. Authorities in Wales reported that among evacuees from Liverpool there were “children in rags,”548 in a personal condition that “baffles description.” Many of the families from which such offspring came perceived the war in less than idealistic terms.
Churchill had much greater faith in the British people than did ministers, which helps to explain his bitterness when they expelled him from office in 1945. Most Conservative politicians were fearful of the working class, conscious of deep popular discontent with the old order. Many voters would never forget the perceived betrayals of the Depression and the prewar foreign policy which had permitted the ascent of Hitler. Thoughtful Tories knew this. Halifax once wrote to Duff Cooper: “We [Chamberlain’s ministers in early 1940] were all conscious549 of the contrast between the readiness of the Nation … to spend £9 million a day in war to protect a certain way of life, and the unwillingness of the administrative authorities in peace to put up, shall we say, £10 million to assist in the reconditioning of Durham unless they could see the project earning a reasonable percentage.”
Many of Britain’s “haves” were acutely nervous of its “have-nots,” especially when popular enthusiasm for Russia was running high. Fear of “the reds,” and of malign consequences from the boost the war provided to their prestige, was a pervasive theme among Britain’s political class. Those with a taste for blunt speaking asserted that Russian Communists seemed to be conducting