Embodying Unemployment: Ableism, Fitness, and Unemployed Men’s Bodies in 1930s Britain

Abstract

In their 2007 essay “‘The Body’ as a Useful Category for Working-Class History,” feminist scholars Ava Baron and Eileen Boris urged labor historians to consider “Why and in what ways … bodies matter for studies of work and the working class.” While scholars have written histories attentive to cultural assumptions about bodies at work, the impact of employment on the human body, and people’s experiences of their working bodies, little consideration has been given to the ways bodies matter for unemployed workers. This article uses Baron and Boris’s invitation to labor historians as a point of departure, but asks, in what ways do bodies matter for studies of people without work? Specifically, in what ways did bodies matter for unemployed working-class men in 1930s Britain? Using parliamentary papers and debates, published first-person narratives, and government documents, I demonstrate that prolonged unemployment was a bodily crisis for working-class men, who expected—and were expected—to direct their bodies and minds to productive labor. Critical Disability Studies scholars’ have emphasized the need to interrogate ableist norms that produce a “corporeal standard,” which for working-class men meant bodies and minds able to perform productive work. Ableist structures, policies, and practices, intersecting in the 1930s British case predominantly with gender and class identities and norms, challenged unemployed men, who experienced unemployment in ways that situated them outside the working-class masculine corporeal standard. To explore these issues, I focus on two closely linked concepts: fitness and employability. During the 1930s, British politicians, bureaucrats, and unemployed men assumed that men who had been without work for prolonged periods of time would not have the physical and mental fitness to be re-employed. I introduce the concept “embodying unemployment” to capture the relationships among discourses, bodily and emotional processes, and material conditions that shaped policy decisions, unemployed men’s experiences, and practices to enhance fitness and employability, highlighting the various perceptions of what caused unemployed men’s bodies and minds to deteriorate from the ableist norm and what strategies might slow or arrest the feared changes.

In a special section on “Unemployment and National Health” in his 1932 annual report On the State of the Public Health, Britain’s Chief Medical Officer George Newman indicated the multiple ways that unemployment could be experienced through the body,

For instance: a) the actual deprivation of an adequate diet; b) the effect of resultant idleness on a manual worker in rendering him unfit to resume his former occupation owing to lack of practice and loss of muscle tone; c) the effect of worry and anxiety in impairing normal bodily functions, e.g. on digestion or in aggravating existing states of mental instability and thereby engendering various forms of neuroses; or d) actual excessive sickness or incapacity.¹

For Newman, experiences of unemployment were gendered, specific to men, and suffered especially by manual laborers. The “idleness” of unemployment caused both body and mind to lose their sharpness, producing the psychological ordeal of anxiety as well as physical aches and pains. Perhaps most significantly, unemployment could make a man “unfit” to return to work. “The harmful effect of unemployment,” according to Newman, made men “victims,” placing them outside the able-bodied norm of working-class masculinity.² Indeed, prolonged unemployment was a corporeal crisis for working-class men, who expected to use their bodies for physical labor and who measured their “fitness”—and whose fitness was measured—in large part through their ability to work.

Feminist scholars Ava Baron and Eileen Boris, in their 2007 essay “‘The Body’ as a Useful Category for Working-Class History,” urged labor historians to consider “Why and in what ways … bodies matter for studies of work and the working class.”³ In the years since Baron and Boris’s call, scholars have written important histories attentive to cultural assumptions about bodies and work.⁴ Unemployed workers are central to understanding the complicated relationships between the human body and capitalism, yet few historians have intentionally centered bodies in relationship to unemployment.⁵ This article uses Baron and Boris’s invitation to labor historians as a point of departure, but amends it to ask, in what ways do bodies matter for studies of people without work? Specifically, in what ways did bodies matter for unemployed working-class men in 1930s Britain?

I introduce the concept “embodying unemployment” to capture the ways unemployment was an experientially and discursively embodied phenomenon; it was something men experienced through their bodies and something that unemployed men, politicians, and government bureaucrats in the thirties constructed around the body.⁶ Embodiment, in this context, encompasses both bodies and minds, with a working-class masculine norm of able-bodymindedness that facilitated men’s productive labor capacity.⁷ Fundamentally, embodying unemployment for British men in the 1930s signified a deterioration from this able-bodyminded standard. While, by the 1930s, unemployment had been recognized as a problem that applied to women in addition to men, a male breadwinner norm connected to men’s earning capacity presupposed working men’s liability to maintain their wives and children. This norm still dominated policies and procedures, however unreal it was in practice.⁸ The problem of the bodily effects of unemployment, as Newman’s report exemplifies, was perceived to be a problem chiefly for working-class men in industrial employment.

To explore the embodiment of unemployment, I tell three interlinked stories about the closely related constructs of fitness and employability, which were central to working-class men’s ability to get and keep jobs.⁹ Relying primarily on parliamentary papers and debates, the section “Unemployment policy and ableist norms” broadly sketches the entanglement of able-bodymindedness, unemployment, and ideas about employability and fitness in relation to welfare from the late nineteenth century to the 1930s. The section “Embodied narratives of unemployment” uses published first-person narratives to examine how working-class men expressed embodying unemployment, and the section “Training for fitness and employability” focuses on government documents concerning state-run “Physical Training Classes” in the 1930s, which aimed to bolster the physical fitness of unemployed workers. During the 1930s, British politicians, bureaucrats, and unemployed men assumed that prolonged periods of worklessness would sap men’s physical and mental capacity to be re-employed. This dis-ability associated with unemployment caused unemployed men to experience crises of identities and roles.

Ableist structures, policies, and practices, intersecting in the 1930s British case predominantly with gender and class identities and norms, challenged unemployed men, who embodied unemployment in ways that made them appear unfit and unemployable. Critical Disability Studies scholars have demonstrated the need to interrogate “the preferability and compulsoriness of the norms of ableism,” which Fiona Campbell defines as “a network of beliefs, processes and practices that produces a particular kind of self and body (the corporeal standard) that is projected as the perfect, species-typical and therefore essential and fully human.”¹⁰ For British working-class men, the “corporeal standard” demanded, among other things, a “self and body” engaged in the performance of productive work. In connection, Baron and Boris have written, “The abstract idea of worker … cast gendered, racialized, aged, and disabled working bodies as deviant.”¹¹ This “abstract idea of worker” (male, white, young, and able-bodyminded), however, also marginalized and disabled the bodies of male, white, young (and not-so-young), able-bodyminded unemployed workers in precisely this way—men who with jobs would generally fit the ableist ideal.¹² Embodying unemployment for interwar British working-class men meant physiological, psychological, and emotional effects that together called into question unemployed men’s able-bodymindedness. Thinking through ableism helps to illuminate the crises associated with men’s deviation from the able-bodyminded norm and the outsider status of chronically unemployed men, even in their own communities.

Unemployment policy and ableist norms

“Unemployment” as a historical construct in Britain has everything to do with the bodily capabilities of working-class men. The term unemployment first came into use in the late nineteenth century, denoting a structural economic problem inherent to industrial capitalism, rather than, as had been the case, an individual’s poor behavioral choices.¹³ A strengthened labor movement, unemployed men’s organizing, and new economic theories that emphasized a more active role for the Government in creating better lives for its citizens insisted on an understanding that unemployment occurred even when men persistently searched for work.¹⁴ According to public policy historian Noel Whiteside, unemployment thus “required the identification of the ‘unemployed’ as a social group” that was different from the mass of people living in poverty, who relied on the stigmatizing Poor Law for assistance.¹⁵ The construction of unemployment in Britain aimed to save “the regular [unemployed] man” from this mass of paupers, many of whom officials regarded as lazy and undeserving.¹⁶ This created a new hierarchy of poverty in order to organize forms of social assistance, such as public works projects, to protect “regular men” not only from the taint of the Poor Law but also from its threat to their able-bodiedness from task work like breaking stone. This separation was in the interests of “regular men” themselves, who demanded recognition as the “honest” poor.¹⁷

Along with the concept of unemployment, as John Welshman has argued, the 1880s and 1890s were key moments in developing the idea of the “unemployable,” which included able-bodied men who “were unable to apply themselves continuously, or who were so deficient in strength, speed, or skill that they were unable to maintain regular employment.”¹⁸ Lack of “strength, speed, or skill” signified an erosion from the productive ableist working-class norm. British policymakers envisaged a role for the state in ensuring that “regular” employable workmen did not deteriorate into unemployability. These bodily constructions of efficiency and deficiency drew on developing eugenicist and degenerationist ideas, which focused explicitly on “fitness” and informed discussions of unemployment. Seen through this lens, some bodies were naturally more fit than others, but unemployment could also environmentally cause efficient bodies to degenerate into inefficiency, making them unfit for regular work.¹⁹

The new structural understanding of unemployment paved the way for more sympathetic approaches to social policy for unemployed “regular” workers, especially with pressure from the nascent Labour Party, founded in 1900. Yet it also suggested that the unemployed body was a body out of control: buffeted by economic forces, unharnessed from its productive labor capacity. The Liberal Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George, in arguing for what would become national unemployment insurance in 1911, stressed that “whoever is to blame for these great fluctuations in trade, the workman is the least to blame. He does not guide or gear the machine of commerce and industry … although he bears almost all the real privation.”²⁰ The 1911 National Insurance Act’s unemployment component was a contributory scheme that covered only the 2.4 million regular workers whose jobs were defined by Lloyd George as “the precarious trades, which are liable to very considerable fluctuations,”²¹ such as construction and shipbuilding. The economic uncertainty of this manual labor challenged the able-bodyminded working-class masculine norm that stressed the strong bodies and economic autonomy gained from hard work.²² Unemployment insurance was needed to save the bodies of deserving men from “privation” to maintain their readiness to return to jobs when they were available. Debates about insurable unemployed bodies did little to identify the health risks of the ideal industrial jobs to which these men would return. As Ronnie Johnston and Arthur McIvor have shown, the “occupational mortality and disability toll [fell] disproportionately upon male workers … [as] part of the price men paid for assertion of their masculinity within patriarchal capitalism.”²³

In the interwar years, unemployment insurance expanded to cover increasing numbers of workers, including women, but Coalition, Labour, and Conservative governments struggled to create a solvent scheme after claimants overwhelmed the system in the recession of the early 1920s. According to historian Stephanie Ward, “between 1920 and 1931, over twenty different unemployment acts were introduced,” responding to “the need to appease social unrest, and, simultaneously, to reduce the public expenditure.”²⁴ Britain’s first Labour Government, elected in 1924, offered hope to the working class. It did little to pacify unemployed workers, however, since it strengthened a “genuinely seeking work” clause as evidence that, according to policy scholar Alan Deacon, “more generous benefits would only be possible if it could be clearly demonstrated that they were exclusively reserved for the ‘deserving’ unemployed, and that those less worthy were still to be left to the Poor Law.”²⁵ Unemployed men (and women) had to demonstrate their deserving status by using their bodies to search for work.²⁶ Unemployment grew further in the early 1930s, hitting over 22 per cent, or about three million workers, in 1932.²⁷ But it was prolonged unemployment that became the “key characteristic” of the 1930s.²⁸ Attentive to long-term unemployment, Britain’s unemployment acts of this period express the central aim of maintaining men’s fitness and employability over time.²⁹

The second Labour Government seated a Royal Commission on Unemployment Insurance in December 1930 to offer recommendations on how to establish financial stability for the unemployment insurance system and how to handle “the unemployed who are capable and available for work” but fell outside insurance, usually because they ran out of benefit eligibility.³⁰ The 1932 Final Report of this Commission, which contained Majority and Minority Reports, reflects how the debates about unemployment insurance depended on the management of unemployed bodies. The Commission was chaired by the Liberal judge Holman Gregory, who signed the Majority Report along with the political economist Henry Clay, professor at the University of Manchester; the philosopher H.J.W. Herrington, Vice Chancellor of the University of Liverpool; E.C.P. Lascelles, who served as a Deputy Umpire for unemployment insurance tribunals; and H.M. Trouncer, President of the Institute of Actuaries, all of whom had some experience with unemployment and social policy. W. Asbury, chairman of the Public Assistance Committee in Sheffield, and “Mrs.” C.D. Rackham, a Cambridgeshire County Councillor, the only members of the Commission who interacted with unemployed men on a local level, were in the Minority.³¹

The Majority Report clearly linked the goals of social policy with keeping the bodies and minds of unemployed men fit and ready for work. The authors reminded readers that unemployment insurance was designed “to provide assistance to genuinely unemployed workers on a basis other than the Poor Law.”³² Yet many worthy men did not qualify for insurance, and the Report’s authors worried about the consequences of prolonged unemployment on the bodies of “fit and efficient” workers, those who supposedly met the ableist norm.³³ While “the least efficient workers” would be the first to be let go by hard-hit businesses, the Majority Report recognized that “industrial changes,” such as the contraction of staple industries like coal mining and shipbuilding, meant that “even the best work-men lose their employment,” and “chronic unemployment is in some cases inevitable.”³⁴ Rather than leave these “best work-men” to lose fitness and become unemployable, the Report emphasized that “the community has a duty to provide for their needs during unemployment, and to take such steps as are practicable to check the deterioration, in employability and character, which may follow on prolonged unemployment.”³⁵ Public assistance, the Majority argued, had an important role in preventing the “deterioration” of normative minds and bodies that could result from chronic unemployment. The Report’s language of deterioration and its connections to fitness and efficiency suggest environmental ideas of degeneration that had been circulating since the nineteenth century in Britain.³⁶

The recommendations of the 1931 Interim Majority Report of this Unemployment Commission informed the 1931 Unemployment Insurance Act, under the coalition National Government, which reduced benefits by 10 percent and introduced means testing for unemployed workers ineligible for insurance (the Labour Government’s 1930 Act had removed the genuinely seeking work clause). Non-insurable workers had to rely on “transitional payments,” locally administered by Public Assistance Committees through what was essentially the Poor Law bureaucracy. The Majority Report authors’ intention was that these able-bodied “victims” of chronic unemployment could be transferred out of what came to be known as “special” or “distressed” areas with high unemployment to regions with better work opportunities.³⁷ In the meantime, however, they had to be differentiated from insurable workers. Additionally, the Majority also proposed continuing Poor Law-type relief for “the able-bodied unemployed [who] require primarily treatment of a deterrent or disciplinary nature.”³⁸ Chronic unemployment could be managed if able-bodied, employable workers received need-based assistance until they obtained jobs, and able-bodied, unemployable workers were punished. The unemployment bureaucracy of the 1930s aimed to ensure that deserving capable men, however long they were unemployed, remained fit and able to work.

The Minority Report “disagree[d] fundamentally” that blameless able-bodied unemployed individuals should be divided between those who had a right to insurance and those who were left to relief “on the grounds of need,”³⁹ which was bound to be experienced as stigmatizing. They trusted that all who looked for but could not find work were “genuinely unemployed.”⁴⁰ Differentiating among unemployed workers was dangerous, for “The self esteem of the unemployed is a national asset; to destroy it is to add moral deterioration to the inevitable physical deterioration of prolonged unemployment.”⁴¹ As Daniel Ussishkin has shown, this was the period when ideas about morale and industrial productivity were being shaped by a variety of experts, such as psychologists, and within labor practices, which increasingly paid attention to a worker’s “will, feelings, desires, and attitudes.”⁴² The Minority Report argued that it was the economic crisis, not unemployed workers, that threatened bodies and morale: “Even if it were to be assumed that the unemployed are on the average less capable or less vigorous than the employed, that would not be a cause of unemployment. All the available jobs can be filled many times over; if some fail to get them, others succeed.”⁴³ While less strongly than the Majority Report authors, the Minority Report still intimated that unemployed bodies were “less capable or less vigorous” than those of men with work, suggesting that unemployment and non-normative bodies were interlinked. They agreed that all unemployed individuals “should be provided for during their temporary wagelessness and that they should as far as possible maintain their physical efficiency,”⁴⁴ but they opposed the means proposed by the Majority. The state needed to craft a system that maintained all unemployed men’s morale and able-bodyminded readiness for work, which would not be facilitated by means-tested relief.

In response to criticisms of the 1931 Act, the National Government proposed a new unemployment bill that would have two parts: Part I covered insurance, while Part II addressed the non- and no longer insurable. These separate parts even more explicitly divided unemployed workers regarding fitness and employability. In introducing the second reading of what would become the 1934 Unemployment Assistance Act, Sir Henry Betterton, the Conservative Minister of Labour, linked (physical) employability with the “feeling” of being fit for industrial work: “Most important is the maintenance of a man’s employability, and the maintenance of his feeling that he is still within the industrial field.”⁴⁵ Betterton emphasized that uninsurable able-bodied workers would no longer have to rely on the local Poor Law machinery of Public Assistance Committees. Instead, the state itself would ensure their fitness.⁴⁶ Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer Neville Chamberlain explained further that with Part II of the 1934 Act, a new Unemployment Assistance Board (UAB) located within the Ministry of Labour (MOL) would be responsible for “ascertaining and meeting, so far as is possible, the physical and mental needs” of workers who fell outside of insurance. Chamberlain remarked that the UAB would

put in the very forefront of their duties the necessity for trying to preserve a condition of mind in which those people will always retain the hope that work in time will come their way, and the determination that when it comes they are going to be ready for it.⁴⁷

The new legislation, according to Chamberlain, would keep up morale among chronically unemployed workers, making them psychologically fit and eager to find work when it was obtainable. As a morale-building project, the UAB also served as a disciplinary measure to ensure an industrial workforce.⁴⁸

In opposition, the Labour MP George Buchanan, representing a working-class section of Glasgow, argued that the Bill the 1931 Act further marginalized chronically unemployed workers, separating them out from able-bodyminded working-class:

Those who come under Part II will be regarded even amongst their own workpeople as outside the working class population… . those who are in Part I will get any of the jobs that are going, they will be starred, while the others will drift down until they become absolutely hopeless, and the nation will try to keep them as cheaply as it possibly can.⁴⁹

The Government, according to Buchanan, proposed to privilege the employability of certain workers whose periodic unemployment could be supported through the insurance scheme of Part I. The UAB, on the other hand, would weaken men, especially psychologically, with need-based relief, creating a permanent underclass of unemployables outside the ableist norm. Despite criticism, the Act passed and formed the structure for unemployment assistance for the remainder of the decade.

Embodied narratives of unemployment

How did chronically unemployed men describe unemployment? Did they see themselves as differently embodied and potentially unemployable? In the 1930s, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) compiled two collections of first-person narratives with the aim of allowing unemployed workers to educate BBC audiences about their experiences. Memoirs of the Unemployed, published in 1934, was edited by the economic historian Hugh Lancelot Beales and the writer and broadcaster Richard S. Lambert, who was also the editor of the Listener, the official magazine of the BBC, where the Memoirs were first published.⁵⁰ Beales and Lambert sought to represent men and women from “different parts of the country and falling under different occupational categories” and used social workers to help them locate a suitable mix of people.⁵¹ Memoirs of the Unemployed contains the stories of twenty-five unemployed men and women, who were asked to respond to a “short guiding memorandum,” which inquired about demographic information; family backgrounds and job and health histories; “struggle against misfortune,” including the types of assistance the family had received; survival strategies; efforts to maintain physical fitness and health; and attitude toward the future.⁵² In the majority of cases, the author composed their own narrative, but in a few instances, the narrative “was taken down verbally by intermediaries.” The editors of the collection wanted to assure their readers that “even with these exceptions, the Memoirs represent the authentic voice of the unemployed authors – the first occasion on which this voice has been heard in the long discussion of unemployment that has dragged on for so many years.”⁵³

The second collection, Time to Spare, published in 1935 what were originally narratives broadcast on radio in 1934, hosted by the well-known broadcaster S.P.B. Mais, who was tasked with “bringing home to the listening public the problem of the unemployed.”⁵⁴ The journalist Felix Greene who edited the collection wrote, “These outspoken, courageous accounts are preserved here. They are the first-hand evidence.”⁵⁵ The emphasis on the courage needed to reveal the “evidence” of unemployment suggests the outsider status of the storytellers, even within the working class. Both collections present the textualized voices of unemployed workers as providing direct access to their experiences. The recognition that these voices had been silenced in policy discussions and that they had value in themselves was itself significant to public discourse. The voices, however, were mediated by the questions posed, the texts selected by the editors, and the environments of the written narratives and broadcasts.

Following scholars who emphasize “narrative embodiedness,”⁵⁶ I read these texts as constructions of “lived, bodily experience.”⁵⁷ According to medical humanist Emily Heavey, narrative embodiedness centers

the material body as the source and topic of a narrator’s stories. Bodily crises are also life crises, and even identity crises, as they present the individual with a new set of (embodied) circumstances, and perhaps a new set of daily routines, social interactions, and expectations for the future.⁵⁸

The narrative constructions of embodying unemployment provide an exemplar of a bodily crisis that was also a life and identity crisis as men described how they deviated from the working-class masculine corporeal standard. While the narratives suggest a shared class experience, as men discussed how power relations shaped their access to jobs and essential resources like food, they also show that factors such as age, overall physical health, and psychological and emotional well-being contributed to diverse embodiments of unemployment.

According to these embodied narratives, unemployment altered the ways men related to the world and exposed the ableist norms within which their bodies were expected to act. For example, a twenty-five-year-old skilled printer, who was at first optimistic about finding a job, expressed a loss of hope: “You begin to feel an outcast of society: as you sit with the other unfortunates in the parks, you hide furtively from passing people your frayed clothes, and try to keep the blank look of despair from your face.”⁵⁹ His description suggests how his identity shifted as his body turned in on itself, even as he felt some kind of affinity for the “other unfortunates.”⁶⁰ Anthony Martin, a thirty-four-year-old ex-seaman, similarly lamented “You feel like you’ve got some disease and people were fighting shy of you.” For Martin, unemployment blurred into bodily disorder and positioned him like a leper to be avoided by general society. Martin suffered accidents that put him in “such a poor state of health … the doctors wouldn’t let” him go back to sea. This confused Martin because he was “discharge[d] as an Able Seaman.” He had to “start life all over again” on shore “when it is was difficult as it could be,” living on public assistance.⁶¹ Out of work for eight years, John Bentley described himself as a “down and out, [a] dosser,” rather than “the unemployed man on the dole,” differentiating himself from men he understood to be more temporarily unemployed.⁶² He “couldn’t recognize” the man he had become, “verminous and starving,” sleeping out, “quite incapable of doing a day’s work even if I had it.”⁶³ His embodiment of unemployment contributed to a complete change of social circumstances and a crisis of identity. These men highlighted a shared sense of alienation from themselves and society when out of work. Their ill-health, tattered clothing, and emotional identification as outsiders caused them to inhabit their bodies in new and unwanted ways that left them feeling exiled and diseased, distanced from the working-class masculine corporeal standard and its social role. Their narratives reflect “a new language of self” that emphasized the connections between body and mind, a notion of the “psyche” as a way to make sense of “identity and experience.”⁶⁴

Some unemployed men explicitly contrasted the ways that they experienced their bodies when in and out of work. Unemployment meant the erosion of their able-bodymindedness, but a return to employment could restore their fitness and employability. A skilled millwright explained, “if I were in work I should be able to work off odd aches and pains, but now if I wake up with a headache it stays with me for two days.” He mused,

I certainly shouldn’t be as slick with my tools now, nor quite as certain of dodging the machinery if I went back to-morrow; but I daresay a fortnight would see me well on the way to recovering my skill as a millwright and, of course, the mere fact of being at work again would make a new man of me.⁶⁵

Here was a specific connection between “being at work” and being a man—a “new man.” The unfit unemployed body would be a danger on the shop floor but would quickly disappear with a job that restored his normative able body. This provided hope that his recent disablement was not a permanent state. Similarly, the skilled wire worker commented that he experienced deafness when he was at home, but “I can hear quite well in a noisy street or workshop… . No doubt I should improve considerably if I were back at work.”⁶⁶ He associated the feminized home with a non-normative body, while linking the masculine public sphere of street and workshop to fitness and employability. His ableist worldview associated employment with a hearing body, and he, too, had hope that a return to work would “cure” him of his connected states of domestication and deafness.⁶⁷ These two men saw a future that included work, which perhaps gave them confidence that their embodiment and role crises were temporary.

Yet when men who experienced prolonged unemployment did return to work, they often described themselves as unfit for the job. One man who had “tried all kinds of work” told of finally securing a position at a foundry after a long period of unemployment. However, “on the second day I collapsed at work and had to be taken home. It was pretty heavy work, and I wasn’t strong enough for the job. From lack of food I hadn’t got the stamina to stand up to it.”⁶⁸ His description evokes a feminized body: collapse, weakness, lack of stamina, dependency on others, and a return home. These themes also worried Anthony Martin, the ex-seaman, who used familiar machine metaphors to portray his condition: “sometimes we can’t manage that bit of work when we do get it. We find we’ve rusted, like a steam engine that has been idle for some time. It deteriorates… . We haven’t got the strength to start a job even if we had one.”⁶⁹ Martin described changes in his body that prevented him from resuming normal life as a manual worker, acknowledging that unemployment had caused “deterioration.” A skilled letterpress printer noted that unemployment prevented him from following the doctor’s orders

as to food, etc., with the result I have slowly sunk into a severe form of ‘nerves’ which has become so acute that if a situation was offered me now in my own trade, I would not mentally and physically be able to do it.⁷⁰

This man directly linked his debilitating “nerves” with his physical hardships, associating his corporeal crisis with the inability to work. Historian Jill Kirby has shown that in the 1930s, research had established that unemployment “could cause psychoneurotic illness and anxiety states,” as part of a larger discourse surrounding what would later be called stress.⁷¹ In addition to being an economic necessity, work was “psychologically supportive” and shaped “personal status and identity.”⁷² The men perhaps struggled to disclose these narratives of nerves, weakness, collapse, and deterioration, suggesting feminization of bodies and roles, since they challenged the core aspect of ableism for working-class men: a body and mind capable of work.

Several of the men’s stories show that embodying unemployment and its connected social and identity crises differed throughout the lifecycle, as ideas about employability and fitness varied with age. From middle age on, for example, it was harder for a man to find work once he became unemployed. A miner from South Wales explained that pit managers consistently told him “There are younger men than you out,”⁷³ meaning unemployed younger men were available for hire. He stated that “On one occasion the boss told me that I was too old, because I was over forty.”⁷⁴ A forty-seven-year-old housepainter in London wrote that during a “fruitless” search for work in 1932, he “even shaved off [his] moustache in an attempt to preserve some semblance of youthful appearance.” Yet the responses he received were commentaries on his “old” age: “‘Sorry, old chap, we are full up,’ or ‘No, old man, we are putting some off this week.’”⁷⁵ Even John Evans, during his time as a machine operator, explained, “I’m only thirty-three, but I’ve been told time after time that I’m too old, and some of my friends who are over forty know for a fact that they’ll never get another job whilst we live under this present system.”⁷⁶ Because industries had their pick of men, they would choose younger, supposedly more able-bodyminded, workers who were also cheaper to hire. This ableist regime marginalized men as they grew older, and once they experienced unemployment, it became that much harder to convince employers they were fit for work.

Men’s stories spoke to other structural dangers of unemployment. Physical weakness often came from insufficient food, which could be blamed on the government’s unemployment policies. The printer explicitly pointed to this problem, challenging on multiple levels the government’s approach to unemployment, health, and the body:

I am given to understand that certain health authorities state that there is no deterioration in the health of the unemployed… . There is a growing weakness in the unemployed through undernourishment, that whilst not perhaps showing as yet, on the surface, is undermining their stamina, and will in time make itself plain in the degeneration of a large percentage of the population… . [This] will be the result of the scanty unemployment benefit.⁷⁷

Lack of proper nutrition for the working class became a heated topic in the 1930s, and the printer seemed attuned to these debates.⁷⁸ As he suggested, the government’s denial of the bodily changes wrought by prolonged unemployment and food deficiency was in its financial interest, but he extrapolated from his own experience the growing “degeneration” from the able-bodied norm. John Evans, whose struggles with unemployment began in 1923 with his discharge from the Royal Air Force, expressed his frustration with definitions of able-bodiedness in regard to government benefits: “A lot of people imagine that because my wife’s blind she gets a pension, but that isn’t true, because in spite of my illness since my operation I’m still theoretically able-bodied, and that means she’s not entitled to assistance.”⁷⁹ The unemployment benefits system classified Evans as an able-bodied breadwinner who should have been capable of working to provide for his wife without government support. Yet his story shows the many ways his embodiment of unemployment placed him outside the corporeal standard encompassed by “theoretically able-bodied,” which prevented him from independently maintaining his family and himself.

The narratives sometimes directly reflected on efforts to retain fitness, keeping bodies in shape to remain employable. While structured courses and physical labor were available in government centers and camps, as I will discuss in more detail below, some men expressed suspicion of government schemes to maintain unemployed men’s employability. For example, Anthony Divers of Liverpool said, “We swore we wouldn’t go to such places. I’d heard the general opinion of them at that time – that it was an army recruiting scheme, and that it was preparing for the next war – that they sent young fellows to get them fit for war.”⁸⁰ This perception was likely influenced by the National Unemployed Workers Movement, which published tracts and held meetings condemning government centers as “slave camps” that both mobilized the unpaid labor of unemployed workers and served as “the thin end of the wedge for conscription.”⁸¹ In the end, Divers did wind up at an Instructional Centre and had nothing but good things to say about its effects on his body: He had better food, including a hot meal each day; he was given a new suit and a new pair of boots “for keeps;” and he gained weight.⁸² Divers dreaded having to return home. At the Centre, he reflected, “we don’t feel set apart no longer.”⁸³ Even though he did not have a job, his return to manual labor, nutritious meals, a man’s clothing, and a community of men in similar circumstances shifted Divers’s embodiment of unemployment, as he felt more normal and less “set apart.”

Some men’s narratives indicate they took it upon themselves to attend to their bodies. Their voices demonstrate experiences of non-normative bodymindedness, often expressed in the discourse of “nerves” and “moods,” which they believed physical exercise could stabilize. A London housepainter noted,

Apart from walking exercise and the amount of fresh air that I take voluntarily and compulsorily, it becomes second nature to take care of one’s own body … [but] This substitute is not comparable to the exercise of body and mind provided by work.⁸⁴

Although employment sustained able-bodymindedness in ways that alternatives could not, this man found that unemployment made care of his body “second nature.” Tellingly, he pointed to the “compulsory” character of his walking, alluding to his needed searches for work. At twenty-eight, an unmarried engineer explained that after several years of unemployment, “What disconcerted me most was the observation in myself of growing physical and moral degeneration.” “The experiences of the last few years,” he wrote, “have left me a victim of nerves, but I try to take open-air exercises when I possibly can,”⁸⁵ to reverse his decline. A young machine worker related, “I kept fit by physical exercises, skipping and cycling, hoping that I soon should be called upon to start work as I wrote numerous applications for jobs.”⁸⁶ Keeping fit fed this man’s hope that he would obtain work. A youth of eighteen subject to “fits of depression and morbidness … attended gymnastic classes every morning, and gradually I shook off my gloomy thoughts and a listless attitude and became keener in my efforts to find work.”⁸⁷ In this case, he represented exercise as contributing to a greater desire to secure employment. These men probably received messages about physical fitness from the Labour Exchanges and Public Assistance Committees where they picked up their dole and relief monies. They seemed to think that without work and a regular routine, their bodies and minds lost the sharpness necessary to be employable, so they attempted to keep fit on their own.

Training for fitness and employability

Concerns with unemployed men’s fitness and employability shaped not only stories of individual bodies but the national body. The Chief Medical Officer Newman, with whose words I began this article, provides an exemplar of the printer’s critique of government officials who downplayed the broader health impacts of unemployment. Given the litany of possible problems he outlined in the opening passage, Newman tempered the connections between unemployment and lack of health and fitness.⁸⁸ His 1932 State of the Public Health ended on the positive note, “Taking the country as a whole … the evidence appears to point to the conclusion that, except in certain localised areas, and in some special and restricted groups, there has been no general excess of sickness, ill-health, or physical incapacity attributable to unemployment.”⁸⁹ He did, however, in 1934, remark that “No inquiry can accurately evaluate the grave, indirect dangers to health of mind and body, which prolonged unemployment involves.”⁹⁰ His somewhat optimistic conclusions, which praised the results of social policy in fending off the worst health outcomes of unemployment, were likely in support of government efforts to keep down the costs of unemployment benefits. This was in a context when other medical professionals were beginning to interrogate the relationships between unemployment and health issues like malnutrition. Their investigations led them to recognize the problems unemployment posed for the health of individuals and the nation and to critique government policies on unemployment benefits and means testing.⁹¹

Government-sponsored centers to promote fitness and employability were offered as a solution to the diseased body-nation produced by chronic unemployment, suggesting that environmental rather than hereditarian reform sensibilities informed the problem. Work training as a condition for unemployment benefits had been part of unemployment insurance acts since they originated in 1911, but this condition had been applied erratically.⁹² By the late 1920s, unemployment policy came to highlight labor camp training for men to enhance their fitness, focusing especially on areas of high unemployment. A civil servant at the MOL wrote in 1929 that training schemes should concentrate on “those, especially among the younger men, who through prolonged unemployment, have become so ‘soft’ and temporarily demoralised” that they would threaten the culture of “ordinary training centers.”⁹³ This assessment linked deviation from able-bodymindedness and lack of morale, a danger that required special reconditioning away from home and separate from “ordinary” men. Yet, according to John Field’s study of labor camps, “the camp managers quickly started reporting that many of the men were too undernourished and unfit to cope with pick-and-shovel work.” It took a few weeks before “they were judged suitable for the ‘heavy navvy work,’” which was supposed to prepare their bodies to return to manual labor.⁹⁴ Their embodiment of unemployment—their unfitness and disablement—worked against the goals of the training camp, which included immediate physical labor to regenerate bodies and minds for employability. Yet faith in physical training remained: The 1934 Unemployment Act empowered the newly constituted UAB to work with local authorities to provide paid training courses “to render [men] more fit for entry into or return to regular employment.”⁹⁵ By 1936, physical training classes for unemployed men under the MOL were organized out of divisional offices in the areas with the highest unemployment: the Midlands, North Western, Northern, Wales, and Scotland divisions.⁹⁶ These complemented other MOL unemployment programs such as Instructional Centres, the residential work camps designed to “recondition human material” through hard labor.⁹⁷

Discussions about the fitness of unemployed men’s bodies and minds occurred in a broader context of a campaign to improve the nation’s fitness, which eventually resulted in the 1937 Physical Training and Recreation Act. Historian Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska argues that the immediate catalyst for the Physical Training Act was Britain’s poor showing at the Berlin Olympic games of 1936, but that “the policy can be traced back to the call for an A 1 nation after the First World War and the debate about national fitness in the wake of the Boer War.”⁹⁸ The physical culture movement in the 1930s appealed to the middle and working classes alike and produced a widespread availability of athletic clubs, gymnasia, and sports associations, many of which were government funded.⁹⁹ In their histories of physical culture and male beauty in Ireland and Britain, respectively, Conor Heffernan and Paul Deslandes have emphasized an interwar, cross-class ideal male body that was athletic, strong, and healthy,¹⁰⁰ which would have been unattainable for working-class men without employment. The British masculine “body beautiful … embraced the restrained masculinity of the good citizen rather than brutalized, misogynist fascist constructions.”¹⁰¹ This tempered masculinity, according to Zweiniger-Bargielowska, recognized women’s larger place in the public sphere after the First World War, and the British fitness movement included the cultivation of healthier women’s bodies, although men and women trained separately.¹⁰² Fitness applied to minds as well as bodies, as the “modern science of health” asserted that the mind and body were inextricably linked in creating “human happiness.”¹⁰³

In line with the general emphasis on physical culture, by the mid-1930s, Government physical fitness centers had become popular as a means to maintain fit, employable bodies.¹⁰⁴ According to historian Charlotte Macdonald, “Government Action emerged from political anxiety [about unemployment and working-class health] as well as from the popular momentum behind better health, sports, and fitness ‘fads.’”¹⁰⁵ Government centers provided a place for men to work out, swim, play football, and keep their bodies physically active. Documents suggest that government officials and the unemployed men who attended fitness courses saw them as a way to ward off the physical and mental effects of unemployment, and bureaucrats had faith in the connections between physical fitness and the ability of men to get jobs. An MOL official wrote in June 1936,

There is no doubt from the reports we receive that attendance at the physical training centres has been a very substantial help to men in obtaining employment. Not only does it make them more physically fit, but it increases their self-confidence and enables them to impress employers when they apply for work.¹⁰⁶

This official insisted that physical training allowed men to attain the level of fitness and self-identity required for employment. H.G. Beales, the Divisional Controller of the Midlands Division of the first nationally sponsored courses that opened in December 1936, reported that the men who signed up for training “did so with the sole object of keeping themselves fit in order to lose no opportunity of getting any work which might become available.”¹⁰⁷ Beales assured the MOL of the utility of the classes: “Cases have been noted where men who were placed in heavy work were able to do the work without the customary stiffness and soreness which follows enforced idleness.”¹⁰⁸ This contrasts with the BBC narratives, where men stressed their own weakness and collapse on returning to work after “enforced idleness.” Exercise in fitness centers, Beales argued, was a means to prevent deterioration from unemployment. By its very nature, engagement with “fitness” centers supported ableist norms that foregrounded men’s able-bodied employability and gave men hope that unemployment did not have to mean bodily collapse.

While, according to Beales (and the BBC interviewees), men had to be convinced that the physical fitness schemes were not “military ‘trap[s],’”¹⁰⁹ correspondence within the MOL suggests that unemployed men themselves expressed a desire for some proof to show employers that their attendance at fitness centers had prevented them from succumbing to the unemployed body:

the men regarded physical training as a useful asset to securing employment and, not unnaturally perhaps, they were anxious to produce documentary evidence to the employer to prove that they were fit to take a job notwithstanding a prolonged period of unemployment.¹¹⁰

Divisional managers reported that cards or certificates could signify an unemployed man’s bodily fitness to show that he was able-bodied and employable: “A trainee who had been unemployed for five years was told by an employer that he would not be able to stand up to the work offered. On production of the [card], however, the employer engaged the trainee who is still in this employment.” In another case, production of a certificate meant “a trainee obtained a job … for which the employer stipulated that the successful applicant must be a fit man.”¹¹¹ These supposed proofs of fitness stood in for the histories of employment that usually indicated an able body and mind, reflecting the ableist thinking that connected unemployment with disability. A training organizer for the Northern Division argued that unemployed men should be able to apply for jobs with “written testimony of ‘Fitness up-to-date,’” which would prove to employers their efforts to keep their bodies in shape for work. He asserted, “It seems only natural that a fit man should reap the reward of his fitness or of his efforts to keep fit.”¹¹² Consequently, men who did not make the effort could be marginalized as unfit and unemployable. This official made the connection clear: “The Trainee himself who is possession of one of these cards is probably fit and physically capable and therefore not nearly so ‘selective’ [in terms of jobs] as the man who is acquiescing in a groove of unemployment and exercising no will to get out of it.”¹¹³ The proof of fitness card became a new way to sort the deserving and undeserving.

Yet there was dissension. One MOL official wrote,

Employers would normally judge a man’s physical fitness by his appearance and the production of a card or certificate showing a short period of attendance at a physical training class might be taken by some employers as an indication that the man attended the class because he was not physically fit.¹¹⁴

In this view, employers could read employability on an applicant’s body, and the use of fitness classes might be seen as a sign of inherent weakness. Rather than proving fitness, the card could mask something deviant hidden in the unemployed body. Additionally, the Divisional Controller Beales worried about “the danger of dissatisfaction if work fails to materialise.”¹¹⁵ Colonel Edward Henslow, who was given oversight of physical training for the MOL, felt deeply about “the inhumanity of training a man for something which does not come. There is something extremely pathetic in a man who has been made physically fit and more mentally alert, if … he begins to feel the futility of his own efforts.”¹¹⁶ This remark again suggests the centrality of morale in discussions of unemployment and the body. A man who put in the effort to fight off the disability of unemployment needed to be rewarded with a job; otherwise, he might feel “pathetic” and his able-bodyminded achievements futile. Henslow also wrote of Labour Exchange Managers who were confused as to which men should be placed in jobs first: those who had “been out of work the longest” (whether or not they were fit) or “the man who is best fitted industrially for work.” He strongly believed that “the men who try hardest … to make themselves fit for work, are more worthy than those who hope to get it without any further personal effort.”¹¹⁷ Men who strove to erase the effects of unemployment in their bodies and minds were more deserving of the ableist normalcy provided by a job.

In August 1939, shortly after Britain entered the Second World War, discussions about the usefulness of a card or certificate of proof of training continued. Henslow wrote in a minute that not only were the cards signs of men’s “fitness and alertness,” but they added value to the MOL’s more general “advice on posters and hand bills to get fit for work.”¹¹⁸ The bodies of unemployed men who attended physical training centers could thus serve to discipline all working-class men whose bodies were not up to fitness standards. Henslow also noted that “Feeling fit for work means ‘wanting work’ and not merely picking and choosing or waiting for something better to turn up.”¹¹⁹ Only men who actively desired work and accepted available employment would be seen as meeting ableist behavioral and corporeal norms. Reaffirming these norms was especially important as the nation prepared for war, suggesting perhaps the critiques of government fitness centers by organizations like the National Unemployed Workers Movement were not off target.¹²⁰

Conclusion

Embodying unemployment in 1930s Britain both expressed men’s corporeal experiences and shaped a discourse about fitness and employability that evolved in relationship to political and economic conditions. British policies and practices suggest multiple understandings of the ways unemployment affected men’s bodies and minds. As policymakers constructed the category “unemployment” in the late nineteenth century, they differentiated regular, able-bodied, temporarily unemployed workmen from the chronically impoverished working class in general and created new state-sponsored support, such as public works projects, to keep them fit and employable during what was seen as their passing worklessness. “Regular” unemployed workmen supported this differentiation, as they demanded the state recognize their deserving status and commitment to return to work. The benefits schemes and physical training classes of the 1930s, however, focused on the preservation of fitness and employability of a broader group of chronically unemployed workers, demonstrating a more capacious definition of unemployment and its ability to damage men’s physical and mental selves. Their examples show a state shifting from dismissing the mass of chronically unemployed men as unable to be recuperated (and undeserving), to one that saw itself as trying to ward off the corporeal collapse associated with prolonged unemployment. Yet the policies and practices of the 1930s still distinguished between “regular” workers who qualified for unemployment insurance and those who fell outside insurance requirements, whose bodies and minds were more likely to deteriorate into unemployability. All these efforts aimed to bring unemployed men’s physical, mental, and emotional states in line with the working-class masculine corporeal standard and sought to internalize the necessity of work: productive labor was the purpose of able male bodies and minds. To be unemployed was to be abnormal.

The stigma associated with unemployed disability comes through clearly in the BBC narratives, which point specifically to the ways men understood how unemployment became incorporated into their bodies. Men told stories about unemployment producing hunger from the inability to purchase adequate food. They worried about the ways it caused mental and physical health problems and emotional distress. Additionally, the narratives suggest how the body’s usual patterns became disrupted during unemployment, shifting an individual’s corporeal experience and identity. Able-bodymindedness consistently operated as the measure of men’s own senses of themselves. Their narratives show evidence both of their dependence and their resistance to becoming bodies in need, reliant on the state to survive.

“Bodies matter”¹²¹ for histories of unemployment just as they do for histories of work. The three stories I have related in this article offer different perspectives on unemployed men’s loss of economic and social power as they deteriorated from the able-bodyminded norm and the various approaches to mitigating that loss through the management of unemployed bodies. The lens of ableism exposes these histories, focusing attention on the normative expectations concerning able-bodyminded labor and the implications of those expectations for unemployed workers and policies concerning unemployment. Embodying unemployment for many signified a profound deterioration from the working-class masculine corporeal standard, which assumed the productive capacity of able bodies and minds. Politicians, bureaucrats, and working-class men themselves, from their shared ableist viewpoint, perceived unemployed bodies as a crisis on which the state could act to rehabilitate men’s identities and social roles.