ABSTRACT
Numerous surveys during the inter-war period demonstrated that significant poverty remained although the situation had improved in the late 1930s compared with the early years after the First World War. There were also significant improvements between the inter-war years and those of the late Victorian and Edwardian periods as demonstrated by Seebohm Rowntree’s detailed follow up at York in the late 1930s when compared to his earlier study in 1899. His first study had shown that poverty among the working class in that city was 43 per cent; it had fallen to 31 per cent in his second study. The causes however had hardly changed; low wages, illness, old age and unemployment. There was little change in the areas affected either; they tended to be found within the inner zones of the large cities such as London, Glasgow, Manchester and Liverpool, or else in areas of heavy industry, especially the coal-mining areas of South Wales and the North East. It was precisely because much of the poverty was confined to particular social groups, areas and industries that it was possible for many to believe that it no longer existed to any significant extent by the 1930s. The new light industries of the Midlands and South East tended to mask the situation of those not sharing in the new found prosperity of the late 1930s.
