Britain rejected fascism in the 1930s, I am not so sure that it will do the same in 2025.

The 1930s should be ancient history. But after decades of neoliberalism, years of austerity, and an end to living wages for most workers, The Great Depression years feel like an analogue version of today. Fascism is as threatening in 2024 as it was in 1933.

This time, I don't think we can win the struggle against fascism. The political class is corrupt and the the corporate news media class is compromised by their association with the 1%.. Outside of paying lip service to the struggles of the many those that govern us and those that report on our governance are disengaged from the economic and social struggles of ordinary citizens. It is a recipe for authoritarianism.

It's one of the reasons I have attempted over these last years to promote my father's working-class history on social media. It’s a slow process but I believe this Substack has kept the flame alive.

Your support in keeping my dad’s legacy going, and me alive is greatly appreciated. I depend on your subscriptions to keep the lights on and me housed. So if you can, please subscribe. And if you can’t -it is all good because we are fellow travellers in penury. But always remember to share these posts far and wide.

The Green And Pleasant Land

Chapter Four:

In Bradford, Dad didn't find work because there was none to be had for able-bodied men, let alone someone with a hernia.  

We barely survived on poor relief- provided by the local council. It afforded us enough for the barest of food rations- so as not to starve but not to eat nutritiously.

Being underfed created a host of physical symptoms for me and my sister, which included leg ulcers and boils that erupted on my body.

These afflictions were commonplace in our neighbourhood- along with lice, rickets and TB.

In October 1929, when stock markets crashed around the world, neither my family nor the other residents of the slum we lived in comprehended that the worst was yet to come for us.

The greed of middle-class speculators combined with an unregulated- corrupt banking industry would wreak more havoc on our lives and society than the First World War or the Spanish Flu.

We didn't know what hit us because Britain's working class thought they had prepared for any economic storm ahead when they elected a Labour government in May of 1929.

My parent's generation was foolish to believe Ramsey Macdonald as PM was insurance against the avariciousness of the entitled and their indifference to the living conditions of ordinary citizens.

Ramsey Macdonald sacrificed the well-being of millions of workers to the harshness of the Great Depression by implementing austerity measures that were as cruel as any Tory government before them.

The government abandoned the working class to a dole that paid an amount which guaranteed famine for the recipient. Millions were without income when the mines closed, along with, the textile factories and the factories shuttered.

Like us, they lived off of paltry government benefits that ensured a belly of hunger. Poverty was everywhere, and it created despair that suffocated hope for a future better than the present.

We were abandoned by Ramsey Macdonald's government and left to wither and rot like fruit that had fallen to the ground in autumn.

At the start of 1930, fuel and food were scarce for us and everyone else without work. I still remember my mother on bleak winter mornings reheating for breakfast the porridge we consumed for supper the night before. While she dolloped it out into our bowls, I'd sing.

“Old Mother Hubbard went to the cupboard to give the poor dog a bone. But when she got there, the cupboard was bare. So the poor doggie had none.”

Despite my mother securing a reduced rent in the doss we lived in, through being a harsh rent collector for its absentee landlord, we still were in arrears. Mum charmed the landlord into patience for his money, but not for long.

So, one night before a bailiff came- we slipped from our doss house lodgings and onto unfriendly streets under cold Yorkshire skies.

This new residence was in a wretched slum that possessed furtive characters who seemed to have lived their entire existence at the edge of the gutter as if they were like water rats that feared the light.

There was an overpowering stench to the room we had moved into of the former tenants' sweat and misery.

During those days in that brutal neighbourhood, we lived famished from sunup to sundown. Until one day good fortune seemed to shine down upon my family.

Mum had gone out to pawn her wedding ring,- and as she walked along Manningham Lane; she spied a leather bag with a chain clasp around it. She picked it up and noticed that it had the name of a department store stencilled across it.

Curious and hungry, she proceeded to open it and discovered fifty pounds in notes and silver in the purse. It was a store’s bank purse, and an accounting clerk must have dropped it in the street- while on his way to make their daily deposit. It crossed Mum's mind to pocket the money and not say a word to anyone because fifty pounds was a King’s ransom to a family living on less than a pound a week. However, my mother’s conscience and the knowledge that she was many things but not a thief wore her down.

My mother walked over to the store, whose clientele were the well-heeled residents of Bradford who had escaped the misery of the Great Depression. Inside, she spoke with the manager. He was officious and thanked her coldly for her honesty. The manager rewarded my Mum’s good turn with a tin of stale, broken biscuits.

Mum fled the store, ashamed and furious that her honesty had paid her so unjustly. Her good deed was valued by the store’s manager to be worth no more than a tin of broken biscuits in a city where children were dying from hunger.

My mother spent that night in bitter silence, locked in a hateful glare towards the tin of broken biscuits.

The following morning, Mum returned with me to the department store and held the tin like a neck being throttled. At the store, she demanded to see the manager. An obsequious attendant asked if the manager would know the reason for her visit.

“He, bloody will."

When the manager appeared, Mum slammed the tin of broken biscuits down on a counter table by the till with so much force other customers stopped and looked for what caused the noise.

My mother shouted at the manager.

“You can take these bloody things back, ”

Aghast, the manager asked.

 “Back? But why?”

“I found fifty pounds of your money yesterday. You think a few broken biscuits are fair compensation for my kindness to your store?”

The manager arrogantly and dismissively replied.

 “Yes.”

“Bollocks, my good deed is worth at least five pounds.”

“Five pounds? But that is a lot of money.” 

“It’s much less than losing fifty pounds.” 

With a haughty disgust, the manager responded.

“I can’t possibly…” 

My mother pushed up close to the manager's face.

“Look, give me a just reward, or I am going to scream that you throw crumbs to a poor mother with two little kids to feed and a sick husband to care for.”

The manager was flustered and looked confused that someone so abysmally poor as my mother would demand more than she was given.

He finally relented because the other customers began to notice my Mum’s outrage.

The manager gave my Mum four pounds under the condition she never returned.

It was a glorious victory for my mother. For the rest of her life, Mum told anyone willing to hear the story about the day she won against the Toffs.

The money she had wrestled from the store manager for returning their deposit bag kept us fed and housed for two months.

My mother was proving to everyone that she had the grit to drag our family to safety during the harsh economic times of the 1930s.

Your subscriptions are so important to my personal survival because like so many others who struggle to keep afloat, my survival is a precarious daily undertaking. The fight to keep going was made worse- thanks to getting cancer along with lung disease and other co- morbidities which makes life more difficult to combat in these cost of living crisis times. So if you can join with a paid subscription which is just 3.50 a month or a yearly subscription or a gift subscription. I promise the content is good, relevant and thoughtful. But if you can’t it all good too because I appreciate we are in the same boat. Take Care, John