ABSTRACT
The first half of this thought-provoking book describes what the author saw in the coal areas of Lancashire and Yorkshire. For some months he lived entirely in coal miners’ houses. ‘I ate my meals with the family,’ he writes, ‘I washed at the kitchen sink, I shared bedrooms with miners, drank beer with them, played darts with them, talked with them by the hour together.’ He went down a mine and spent an hour of agony, crawling to the coal face. He got to know exact details of average working-class budgets, and witnessed the result of mass unemployment at its worst and the cruel effect of the Means Test in breaking up families. He examined, and gives a minute description of, every kind of working-class dwelling, from the horrifying and disgraceful caravan settlements, at Wigan and elsewhere, to the ‘Council’ houses which are, all too slowly, being erected to replace them. This section is illustrated with thirty-two photographs of slums, which are calculated to shock even the most complacent.
