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Work camps in the woods by BRYNLEY HEAVEN
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Work camps in the woods by BRYNLEY HEAVEN
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| DURING THE 1930s, more than 100,000 unemployed men were sent for toughening up to a network of pick and shovel camps set up by the government in remote spots throughout Britain. In theory this was voluntary. But for men from areas hardest hit by the world depression such as north east England, there was no work to be had and they would lose the dole if they refused to go. Summer camps were set up in the woods around Bourne, at Temple Wood, Aveland Way, Aslackby and Callan's Lane, Kirkby Underwood. Mrs Adeline Harrison of Aslackby married in December 1931. She remembers walking past the Nissen huts with her two young children in the mid 1930s and finding it a friendly place. Mr Cyril Pickering of Aslackby, who had worked with steam threshing machines, got a job as ganger at the camp around 1932. He told his son that many of the men enjoyed the experience of surface work, having endured the privations of the Durham coalfield. They were "good lads" planting the trees, he said. Unemployed Durham miner Peddlar Wilson, a tough little man who liked to bet on the horses, married locally and raised a family at Folkingham. Jim Shuttleworth, a noted boxer, also found a local bride. Mr Ernest Wyer was among the children from Kirkby Underwood given cigarette cards by the men from the Callan's Lane huts as they walked into the village to go to the Three Tuns pub. "Every summer there was a sports day and all the children from the village were invited for a tea party with jelly. In the field opposite the wooden huts there were pillow fights and a game with wheelbarrows and poles like jousting where the loser got drenched with water." Camp resident Lawrence Roberts from Leicester married Dorothy Minns from Rippingale. The official mind saw it differently. A civil servant at the Ministry of Labour explained to a colleague: "I think I ought to warn you that we deal with a class of men who, through prolonged unemployment, have become so soft and temporarily demoralised and [they] cannot be considered by our local officers for transfer until they are hardened." All mainstream parties supported the camps, but conditions varied and there was pressure for a punishing regime. The People newspaper reported with relish: "Concentration camps for the unemployed, so described by Sir John Gilmore, the Home Secretary, are now being planned. In these camps, the men will be disciplined on military lines, with early morning parades for drill, kit inspection, parades for working parties and parades for meals. Offenders against the regulations will be marched before a camp commandant at the orderly room every morning." Mr Gaukrodger was a paid orderly at three camps over a period of eight years of service: "At the end of training, none of them got jobs, they just went back home again. If they stopped for three months they kept the trousers and all that, you see." According to official figures, 24,264 men in all voted with their feet and absconded or were asked to leave despite the risk of having no money at all. A fascist leaning landowner applied for state funding to run unemployed camps. A civil servant very properly wrote: "I have ascertained privately that he is in half-a-dozen movements, including the Nazis in Germany." More typical perhaps was Mr Christopher Turnor, a landowner with large Lincolnshire holdings based at Stoke Rochford near Grantham. Turnor, no fascist, was on chatting terms with the Prime Minister, Ramsay Macdonald, and moved in a wide circle of influential people. Writing from Lincolnshire on 1st August 1939, Turnor supported land camps for the young unemployed but was otherwise sceptical. In the light of his visits to Nazi Germany, he said: "Since the advent of Hitler to power, there has been a carefully thought out plan to use the land as a means of regenerating the nation. Discrimination against the landowner has ceased." Turnor's Lincolnshire book Yeoman Calling is an important corrective to the view of the 1930s seen through hindsight of the Second World War. He gushes with enthusiasm for Germany: "To refuse to study these achievements, simply because they have been effected under a system of government that we do not like, is not intelligent." he says. Turnor built German cottages on his Stoke Rochford estate. The ones designed after 1933 are "pleasing to the eye", he says. In fact he was so keen he includes the plans in his book! Professor Desmond King of Oxford University has studied the policy background that justified the work camps. He points out that those who relied on the shortcomings of the unemployed men would have to explain "the ease with which the unemployed returned to the labour market at the end of the 1930s, pointing to the temporary character of any 'demoralisation' arising from the absence of work." One Sheffield veteran confirmed: "I am sure camps varied with the management and the intake. Most of ours were labourers in the steel and cutlery businesses, not skilled process workers in foundries and rolling mills. I got hungry, cold if not damp. Discipline was fairly casual, partly communal. The meals were porridge at breakfast, bread and soup evening and stew dinner also with bread, limited. Once you had done heavy manual work you soon re-acclimatised after a break." WRITTEN JULY 2003
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