Doleful Humour: Laughing Off Unemployment Between the Wars? *

1. Introduction – Doleful Humour?

You would not think there was (or is) that much to laugh at about being on the dole, or having to live on unemployment benefits, or about other people being on the dole. Nevertheless, there were quite a number of humorous (?) texts about the dole during the interwar period, including while the depression was at its worst in the early to mid-thirties. This article will explore first the origins and history of the word ‘dole’, and the (contested) attitudes and assumptions linked to the term in the thirties, and then look at works which found something to laugh about in the dole, and what these works might tell us about attitudes to the dole and unemployment. They include traces of a number of lost stage works, an early George Formby film, and finally two rather unusual comic post-cards by Donald McGill. Who was likely to have found these works funny, or at least distracting, and why? Were such comic works necessarily hostile to those on the dole, or could humorous dole texts be used for other purposes? Comedy and humour can be unpredictable, rule-bending, and unconventional, so it may be that there will be surprising examples of how the dole is treated. Of course, there are also elements of comedy and humour in Greenwood’s own first work about unemployment and the dole, which in itself was not necessarily to be expected. The article will finish therefore by looking at Greenwood’s (and co-writers’) own uses of comedy and humour in Love on the Dole, novel, play and film, before drawing some conclusions about the possibilities of ‘doleful humour’ between the wars.

2. History and Meanings of the word ‘Dole’

‘Dole’ is an Old English word with a Germanic root, with meanings both as a verb and a noun to do with dividing up or sharing out, or that which is divided or shared out in portions (it is related as a ‘parallel form’ to ‘deal’, both as a verb and a noun). My source for all this knowledge about the word is of course OED (The Oxford English Dictionary) in its online edition. It gives as an early example of the word’s usage (sense 1) a sentence from Aelfric’s translation of The Book of Genesis from Latin into Old English dating to the late tenth century; it is from Exodus viii, 23: ‘Ic shal sette dal betwux thin folc & min folc’ [‘thin’ should be written with the Old English letter ‘thorn’ instead of ‘th’, but there is apparently no easy way of doing this with the available Microsoft Word fonts or keystrokes!]. I translate this as ‘I shall set a division between your people and my people’; the King James Authorised Version translates the same phrase from the Old Testament thus: ‘I will put a division between my people and thy people’. The speaker is God and the two peoples divided are the Israelites in their Egyptian captivity and the Egyptians who will next be visited by plagues for not letting the captives go free.

This ‘obsolete’ (OED) sense is reasonably closely related to more modern senses, but our immediate interests are more closely linked to OED current sense 6a:

That which is distributed or doled out; esp. a gift of food or money made in charity . . . the popular name for the weekly payments made from national and local funds to the unemployed since the war of 1914-18. (to be or go) on the dole (to be or start being) in receipt of such unemployment relief

The latter part of this definition firmly links the word ‘dole’ to the development of ‘social security in Britain in the twentieth century, while the first part refers to older and broader acts of charity, usually linked to religious foundations, which are still maintained under the word ‘dole in a few places.

The negative connotations of the word ‘dole’ also seem to have been influenced by OED’s sense 2a. which relates to grief and sorrow, and by the originally more neutral sense 4, which is about one’s ‘lot’ in life, that is what one is dealt or apportioned. This sense was embodied in the proverbial saying ‘happy man be his dole’, which expressed a positive wish for a fortunate destiny in life for others. At some point though, ‘dole’ became chiefly associated with a negative fate, as embodied in the related adjective form ‘doleful’, senses 1 (‘distressful, gloomy, dreary, dismal’) and 3 (‘expressing grief, mourning or suffering’). Thus dole became a word with connotations of suffering even if it did also refer to a payment or earlier a charitable gift designed to sustain life in bad times. Indeed, Greenwood perhaps draws on this verbal relationship once in the novel of Love on the Dole, in a conversation between Helen Hawkins and Harry Hardcastle when he has been laid off by Marlowe’s at the end of his apprenticeship. She is hopeful he will soon find a new job on man’s wages, but Harry feels much more negative: ‘Her attitude was surprising. He said, dolefully: “Aye, but Ah’ve just bin round Trafford Park. They don’t want nobody.” He stared at her with misgiving’ (pp. 160-161).

3. The Serious Business of the ‘Dole’ and Unemployment Benefits in the Nineteen Thirties

However, newly-coined terms for payments in a new world of state-supported social security after the first World War were surely intended to replace ancient terms like ‘dole’, and to remove these new payments from the realm of charity and association with the ‘work-house’ and ‘poor relief’ Those words and phrases were still a source of horror even in Greenwood’s day, partly because, apart from the strong folk memory of what these words meant, these ancient institutions were in fact not completely dismantled after World War One. Some of the longest-term unemployed did have to approach the remaining vestiges of workhouse provision – indeed in Love on the Dole, we see Harry Hardcastle and Helen forced to approach the workhouse for relief since he has exhausted his benefit and they have no other source of income while she is pregnant and cannot work at her mill job.

While post-war unemployment benefit was based on working people paying ‘insurance’, and was thus neither charity nor poor relief, but an earned entitlement from employment, it was planned on the basis that unemployment would be for relatively short periods. However, the long-term unemployment caused by the Depression meant that very large numbers of workers were put in a position where they exceeded that allowed unemployment insurance benefit period of twenty-eight weeks, and though there were emergency measures put in place to extend benefit for a further so-called ‘transitional period’, that too was for a limited period. And to access ‘transitional benefit’ involved what were perceived as links to older and humiliating practices. In the face of economic crisis the National Government introduced the Means Test to assure themselves and tax-payers that only the ‘deserving’ would be in receipt of ‘transitional benefit’ after the benefit from their insurance had run out.

In its portrayal of Hanky Park people the text of the novel of Love on the Dole certainly suggests that ‘the dole’ remained the default term for ordinary people, presumably still carrying some of its history, while newer terms such as ‘unemployment benefit’ or just ‘benefit’ were used much less, and often only in official contexts or, indeed, by officials. The novel uses the word ‘dole’ twenty-eight times, mainly in the speech of its characters, while the term ‘benefits’ is used just six times, and mainly in scenes set in the Employment Exchange (which I notice Harry calls the ‘Unemployment Exchange’ – perhaps in itself a grim joke on Greenwood’s part?, p. 194). These uses of the term ‘benefit’ include a summary of a notice expressing official distrust of some unemployed people which is posted in the Exchange and warns claimants against abuses of the system:

It was a pink bill, a warning to the unemployed, telling how a local man who had drawn benefit for his employed wife whom he had represented not to be working, had been sentenced to ‘THREE MONTHS’ HARD LABOUR’ (p. 156).

The negativity associated with the word ‘dole’, and those on the dole, was also actually promoted, often by reporting or elaborating on ‘cases’ like that in the warning poster in the Exchange, by some elements of the press. Stephanie Ward gives an overview of the underlying thinking behind at least some conservative views in her book Unemployment and the State in Britain: the Means Test and Protest in 1930s South Wales and North-east England (Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2013):

When the National Government formed in the autumn of 1931, its primary aim was to reduce the budget deficit of £120 million. The retrenchment of public expenditure was endorsed by many in the public, and the role of the press in running stories of dole abuse undoubtedly influenced public opinion. Reports in national and regional newspapers argued economies were not only financially necessary but would prevent the workshy from claiming the hard-earned funds of taxpayers (p. 65).

The idea that some would much rather claim the dole than work was one with a long history, linked to a sense that unemployed people had chosen their status, or at least arrived at it through poor economic and moral choices (including spending money on ‘vices’ such as drink and gambling rather than on necessities). This was a set of ideas, or better ideologies, which tended to pit employed against unemployed, and the skilled working-class and middle classes against the less skilled and financially less secure. It was much easier to blame the unemployed for their fate if they could be imagined as having brought it on their own heads. As early as 1925 the Daily Mail was running articles which were openly hostile to the whole system of dole payments, linking them without nuance to ‘idleness’. Thus one of a series of reports (‘reports’?) on the dole had a sub-heading as follows:

In the fourth of his series of articles on the Dole our special correspondent gives figures showing the cost to the nation not only in cash paid to the idle but also in production lost by their idleness. Also the deterioration in character caused by the Dole is a loss not calculable in figures (‘The Dole – Real Cost to the Nation’, April 27, 1925, p.9).

This was not the last similarly inflected report in the paper, even when the Depression bit deeper after 1929: we shall meet the word ‘idleness’, though used in a variety of ways, several more times . Stephanie Ward suggests a tension in Government policy which wanted at least to sustain the unemployed but which also fed into their potential demonisation through enshrining a distrust of them, especially in the form of the Means Test which precisely tested whether individuals really needed benefit or needed as much as they were claiming:

The contradictions and tensions in the National Government’s policy of reform (to defuse political tension) and retrenchment reflected the ambiguity that surrounded its position regarding the long-term unemployed. On the one hand, the numbers of jobless made them a body to be feared, but, on the other, reports of dole abuse also made them a group connected with illegality, fraud and idleness. While reforms attempted to pacify the unemployed, the commitment remained to eradicating abuses. Undergoing a means test examination was often characterised as a patriotic ‘duty’ to help the economy (p. 77).

The social historian John Stevenson gives a very clear account of the impact and mechanisms of this detested measure:

Assessment of ‘means’ involved relieving officers visiting people’s homes, prying into their circumstances, suggesting they sell items of furniture, or reducing relief because of savings, or incomes from sons, daughters or pensioners living within the household … . The means test became one of the most despised aspects of the inter-war years and long after the Second World War a source of bitterness and ill-feeling (British Society 1914–45, pp. 276–77)

Certainly, as illustrated by Greenwood’s representation in Love on the Dole, these ideas about unemployment relief, accompanied by a strong belief both about but also among working people that independence and respectability were key virtues, tended to rob unemployed individuals and families of self-respect and could readily imply that they should feel shame for drawing benefit. Stephen Constantine (the historian who did the seminal work on the wide impact of Love on the Dole) describes the dynamics between working-class ideas of respectability and unemployment especially well:

The distress caused by idleness underlined the importance of work to the working class. Work had three principal values. Most working people completely accepted the concept of work as a duty; skilled workers especially were proud of their work: employment gave a man status and respectability. Moreover work satisfied the social instincts of human beings: a man at work was a man with friends, a member of a social group, part of society. And, of course, work was rewarded with money. Without a job many workers, especially in the early years of the depression, felt acutely ashamed and humiliated. That they were out of work seemed a reflection on their character. They felt they lost status. Unemployment benefits seemed like poor relief or charity handouts, and dependence on them sapped self-respect (Unemployment in Britain Between the Wars, Seminar Studies series, 1980, Pearson Education, reprinted by Routledge, 2014, p. 38).

Indeed, the Means Test seemed to working people much like a return to the days of the workhouse and poor relief:

From 12 November 1931, for the first time every unemployed person who had received twenty-six weeks insurance benefit had to prove their need through a public assistance-style means test. This included, most controversially, the income of other household members. Two classes of unemployed applicants were created between those who received flat-rate insurance payments and those who received means-tested transitional benefit. This division was cultural as well as bureaucratic. The means test investigations were to be carried out by the Public Assistance Committees which had been created under the Local Government Act, 1929, following the abolition of the Boards of Guardians The PACs were viewed as the successors to the poor law guardians and carried the taint of destitution and loss of respectability. Although the increased number of jobless may have demonstrated that unemployment was an economic problem and not the consequence of personal failure, few of the unemployed wished to be associated with the poor law (Ward, Stephanie, Unemployment and the State in Britain: The Means Test and Protest in 1930s south Wales and North-east England (p. 66).

‘The Boards of Guardians’ were, of course, the bodies responsible for administering workhouses and poor relief, and as Ward writes, the similar function of the Public Assistance Committees seemed obvious and ominous to working people.

Greenwood and his mother and sister suffered directly from the Means Test after his entitlement to unemployment benefit, or the dole, expired. His friend and theatre colleague Bernard Miles (1907-1991) recorded in his obituary for Walter that the writer had told him:

The family piano and much other furniture was sold under the means-test rule. Even the kitchen table went, and he did his writing on an old mahogany trouser-press’ (obituary, ‘Fame on the Dole’, Sunday Times, 15 September 1974, p.3).

Indeed, in an early interview by Greenwood with the journalist Hannen Swaffer in 1935 about the play version of Love on the Dole, there is an emphasis on the experience of the Means Test as a major motivation for writing the novel and play (see Walter Greenwood: ‘Tragedy Behind the Play’ Interview (Hannen Swaffer, Daily Herald, 1935) ). In his memoir Greenwood recalled bitterly the kinds of Means Test questions the Public Assistance Committee would ask imperiously of those who applied to them for further benefit:

‘Have you any stocks and shares, bank deposits or investments of any kind? Any unnecessary items of furniture? How much does you mother earn? What are you sister’s wages?’ You knew in advance what the verdict would be. (There was a Time, 1967, p.227).

Of course, the first two questions are ironically indeed grim jokes – there were not likely to be many investors in stocks or shares or anything else in Hanky Park – but everyone had furniture which could be judged ‘unnecessary’ (who needed a kitchen table?), and some were likely to have family members working and earning just enough to keep themselves but not really others (the case in the Greenwood family). Greenwood did not, in his later accounts anyway, quite share the sense of shame which some others felt, though he knew the chances of making it as a writer were very small:

I had to admit that . . . the land of ‘If’ might be trailing its fanciful promise, luring and beckoning only to deceive. But what had reality to offer by way of alternative? The prison of an office job, if one could be landed, at twenty shillings a week? No, let the newspapers shout ‘Workshy’ and ‘Letters to the Editor’ throw the jibe ‘Weary Willies’ at the unemployed, where I was concerned (p.223).

Varying assumptions about the dole and those on the dole were, of course, ones with different and opposed political investments, conjuring up differing images of the unemployed. Those trying to combat stereotyped views of the dole documented its damaging and sometimes tragic consequences. Stephen Constantine reports on a terrible case highlighted by the Communist activist Allen Hutt in his book The Condition of the Working Class in Britain, Lawrence & Wishart, 1933, where an inquest was told of ‘how an unemployed man’s wife literally starved herself to death for her children’ (Constantine, Stephen. Unemployment in Britain Between the Wars, p. 94). These kinds of contested views of the dole and its effects may or may not influence but are certainly a background to the ‘comic’ texts we shall explore, and indeed for the genesis and form of Love on the Dole itself.

4. Comedy and the Dole

4.1. Comic Dole Revues

There was, surprisingly, quite a long interwar history of allegedly comic theatre or music-hall ‘revues’ focussing on the dole. Titles played a number of basic variations with the key word ‘dole’ and prepositions, together with the odd verb or noun: ‘On the Dole’, ‘Keep Your Dole’, ‘Off the Dole’, ‘Laugh on the Dole’, ‘Love for the Dole’. Some of these were post-Greenwood and Gow productions and so likely to have elements of parody of their work, but others were earlier and might perhaps subliminally have influenced the title of Greenwood’s original novel, over which he certainly hesitated in 1933, only switching on the proof copy from They Call it Love to Love on the Dole, which resembles the form of title used in these revues:

The earliest reference I have found to a ‘dole revue’ dates back as far as 1924 when the Burnley News carried an advert for:

Thomas F. Convery’s Comedy Revue ON THE DOLE in nine scenes.

Cast includes ALBERT BURDON, AVA BURDON, HARRY CLAYTON, VIE VIVIENNE, JACK WA[K?]EFIELD, BILLY RUSSELL, SYD. RAILTON, and JOHNNY KAVANAGH (27 August 1924, p.1).

Played twice nightly, entrance cost a maximum of 1/6 for the stalls and a minimum of 5d for the gallery. Convery was a well-known producer of revues, with an eye for current topics such as in his 1921 show Demobbed, presented in:

Five Parades. A Burlesque on Army Life and the Humorous Side of the Demobilisation Procedure (as advertised at the Hippodrome by the Huddersfield Daily Examiner (28 September 1921, p. 1).

This perhaps appealed to a mass audience of families who had experienced the demobilisation of 1918 to 1921 and might well be glad to laugh at it once safely outside the army and safely back home? Even earlier was his equally topical ‘farcical comedy revue’ Rationed, which played at the Theatre Royal Blyth in summer 1918 (Blyth News, 18 July 1918, p.2). Nearly thirty years later, in 1948, Convery was still presenting a ‘GIGANTIC & SPECTACULAR CHRISTMAS PANTOMIME [of] RED RIDING HOOD’ at the Royal Hippodrome, Eastbourne (Eastbourne Herald, 25 December 1948, p.3).

On the Dole seems to have had a long run at many variety theatres and was considered a great success among revues. It was presented in Portsmouth in 1925 (Portsmouth Evening News 11 Feb, p.2) in London at the Chiswick Empire in 1926 (West London Observer, 3 September 1926, p. ) and was still on tour to Cardiff in March 1927. Indeed, the Cardiff notice refers to the show as ‘record-breaking’. What we do not (I think) have is any kind of play-text so that we could look in detail at what made up the linguistic or narrative content of the nine scenes. However, the Cardiff notice gives considerable insight into the kinds of entertainments they did include at least:

On the Dole, the record-breaking comedy revue, will be presented by Thomas F. Convery’s Enterprises (Limited) at the Empire, Cardiff, next week. The chief reason for its continuous success is the fact that its cast is headed by Albert Burdon, one of the greatest revue comedians of to-day. In the majority of the nine scenes which constitute the revue, this clever young performer is the cause of endless merriment, whether it be in singing, dancing, comedy or acrobatic antics (Western Mail, 26 March 1926, p. 8).

It is quite hard to imagine the ways in which the dole theme was treated in order to produce these variety elements. However, in due course we will look at a film which seems to be in a similar genealogy and so may give us a sense of the ‘variety’ version of the dole. On the Dole may have been particularly successful, but it was not the only interwar revue focused on the dole. In summer 1928 The Stage carried an advert seeking a cast:

WANTED, AUG. 13, also 20^th. For the Real Comedy Revue, KEEP YOUR DOLE, WE WANT WORK. Brim full of fun. Exceptional vocalism. Novel specialities. Clever dancing. 20 Artists who are Workers. Wire for Aug. 13, BOYE, Hippodrome, Wednesbury; next, Pavilion, Epsom (2 August, p. 19).

Again we do not know exactly what constituted the verbal contents of this piece. The title might suggest a desire to conform to the requirements of ‘respectability’ by maintaining the independence of employment but is there indeed an also implication that this show in itself will keep some actors, and ‘artists who are workers’ off the dole and in work? Maybe then there is a radical element in this resistance to victimhood, but nevertheless the show is clearly a revue and will be ‘brim full of fun’. ‘The Real Comedy Revue’ company seems to have been in business from about 1922 onwards, but I have not found any ‘manifesto’, or similar document outlining what, if anything, made it distinctive. A notice for Keep Your Dole at the Regent Theatre, Longton, in the Staffordshire Sentinel made clear that like On the Dole, it presented (this time in ’16 scenes’) a variety diet including singing and dancing and that the overall effect was ‘very amusing’ (14 August. p.8). An advert for the show in the same paper three days earlier had indeed promised ‘roars of mirth’ and ‘yells of delight’ (11 August, p. 1)

In the same year another Dole revue was on tour too, and was in fact a sequel by Thomas F. Convery to his earlier show On the Dole:

Off the Dole, which will be at the Empire next week, bids fair to attain the enviable fame which was achieved by its predecessor On the Dole. That likeable personality, Bob E. Bayes, has charge of the comedy department and he is prominent in several witty sketches in addition to his individual appearances. Off the Dole is described as being ‘off the beaten track’ and this will be admitted by those who see the production. Bob E. Bayes is supported by a large cast including the Cosmo Jazz Band. One of the members of the cast, W. Harrison-Viney, who submits a smart musical turn, is a well-known Burnley man (Burnley News, 26 May 1928, p. 15)

The reference to ‘several witty sketches’ might suggest a greater verbal content, though this may be just a matter of emphasis, and the presence of the Cosmo Jazz band makes clear that music is still important (though I sadly find no trace of this band anywhere else, for example in any 78 records or sheet music releases). Perhaps the ‘off the beaten track’ comment might imply that this show had something of the quality of what was slightly later in the thirties and forties termed ‘screwball comedy’?

Similar revues continued after the success of Greenwood and Gow’s play of Love on the Dole after 1934, sometimes with specific reference to what was now this more dominant if somewhat different ‘dole show’. Thus the Derbyshire Times advertises, forthcoming at the Chesterfield Hippodrome, ‘LAUGH ON THE DOLE (Nothing to do with Love on the Dole)’ (24 January, 1936 (p.12). A notice in another paper gives us one of the most specific ideas of what might have formed the content and structure of such revues:

Laugh on the Dole is a spectacular and entertaining revue, at the Empire Theatre, containing many items of much merit. Comedy is kept in the forefront throughout fourteen scenes, and to Jimmy Bryant, ‘the pocket comic’, falls the greater share of the laughter making. Perhaps the most amusing scene is that devoted to a burlesque of all-in wrestling. ‘The Confidence Trick,’ ‘Outside the Labour Exchange’ and ‘Would-be Musician,’ are other uproarious scenes. Modern jazz and hot rhythm find first-class exponents in the Society Boys and Bunny Hill (Northern Whig, 26 November 1935, p. 11)

It sounds as if possible ‘places’ in the routine of someone on the dole spark music / comedy/ dance routines, as in other kinds of musical theatre. Thus presumably ‘Outside the Labour Exchange’ developed something out of a queue of men and a street scene, while ‘Would-be Musician’ constructed a scene from a (perhaps not very convincing) busker. The Coventry Evening Telegraph similarly informs us that ‘sketches providing real wholesome merriment have their settings outside a Labour Exchange, in a haunted house, and on the open road’ (7 April, 1936, p.6). The Labour Exchange does not to me seem altogether the ideal setting for ‘wholesome merriment’, while the haunted house setting again suggests a certain looseness in focus and plot. As late as 1943 (when one might have thought dole revues were somewhat out of date with surely so many newer topics) one is advertised at the Jubilee Theatre in Leven in Fife:

Another Smashing Show – First Time Here

MORAN KNIGHT & COMPANY

in Domestic Sketches ‘Love on the Dole’, ‘Fun in the Back Court’ (Leven Mail, 10 November 1943, p.1).

The show included two singers, a conjuror, acrobats and a ‘Versatile Entertainer’, who could presumably do almost anything! Precisely how these entertainers interacted with the dole and back-yard setting we do not know.

4.2. A Comic Film: Off the Dole (1935)

In September 1935 the music hall star George Formby released only his second film, called Off the Dole (a DVD is currently available: Simply Home Entertainment, VFD92073, 2007). Despite the shared title, I do not think this was a film version of Thomas F. Convery’s revue Off the Dole from 1928 (though the poster says it was ‘adapted by Arthur Mertz’, implying an original, there is no reference to Convery), but anyway it may be the nearest we can get to a sense of how these revues used the topic of the dole, and represented those on the dole – though as the title suggests the dole is in this case a jumping-off point and so only really present at the opening of the film.

Poster included on the IMDB website entry for Off the Dole (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151802/?ref_=tt_mv_close); I am unsure of its copyright status. Blakely clearly felt no inhibitions about making hyperbolic claims for his new film productions – it was a very large claim to say that this was ‘the greatest comedy film ever offered in the history of the screen’; however, Formby was already a music-hall star by this point, and it seems to be true that the film was quite a big hit, with large queues outside cinemas, at least in north of England venues.

In his early stage act, Formby appeared in the character of John Willey, whose name (and acts and costume) he had inherited from his father. In these first two films he also appeared as John Willey. The images below illustrate the evolution of John Willey (without quite getting to the end-point of George Formby). The first two images show him in the stage act and costume he took over after his father’s death when his son was sixteen, and must date to between 1921 and 1935 (from Formby’s youthful appearance, I think probably early in this period). The third image shows him as John Willey in his first film, Boots, Boots! (1934), while the fourth and fifth images are stills from Off the Dole, including Willey’s conversation with the Labour Exchange manager, and the Ukulele song he sings to his mother. Between his early stage act and the first film, Formby had modified the shape of his father’s low-crowned bowler and replaced the jacket. In Off the Dole he kept the new bowler, but adopted a new checked jacket (which he never wore again after adopting the somewhat different film persona of George Formby – and in fact abandons it in this film for a more conventional if loose-fitting suit to take up his employment as private investigator). The first image is a Gutenberg ‘Real Photograph’ card, the second and third are Prism Card reproductions (1993) of earlier images one presumably the front view of the Gutenberg image (all scanned from cards in the author’s collection), while the fourth and fifth images are gratefully borrowed from the informative web-site of the George Formby Society: https://www.georgeformby.co.uk/films/dole/report1.html .

The Evolution of John Willey

The description at the top of the Off the Dole poster, ‘A Merry Musical Burlesque’ suggests considerable continuity with the stage revues. The Mancunian Film Corporation was founded by John Blakeley in 1933 precisely to place some of the northern music hall stars he was connected with into the medium of film. The financial arrangements were extremely small-scale, with minimal expenditure on sets , studios and technical equipment, though Blakeley reaped a large return. Blakeley’s first featured music-hall star was a well-chosen one – George Formby Jnr, as he was then known off-stage (though not yet onstage). In the same year the novel of Love on the Dole was published, Blakely began work on Formby’s first film, Boots, Boots! (1934), which was followed the next year by Off the Dole, which was released in 1935, the same year in which the play of Greenwood and Gow’s Love on the Dole opened in London. Neither of Blakeley and Formby’s first two films look at all sophisticated to modern eyes, both being revue-like in their structure (such as it was), but this was in a sense a deliberate aesthetic (if also financial) choice on the producer’s part at least, and partly a translation of a stage variety genre onto screen. Richard Dacre makes this choice and its effects very clear:

Mancunian [Film Corporation] was custom-built to serve Blakeley’s minimalist style of film-making, for his objective was to turn out his product as quickly and cheaply as possible with the minimum of fuss. His selling point was the star comic – and any old hackneyed plot was allowed as long as space was provided for the comics to do ‘bits of business’ drawn from their stage acts . . . This lack of concern for overall vision and pre-planning permitted inconsequential plots to ramble over sometimes inordinately long running times. If ultimately this restricted the appeal of the films to a core, generally Northern, working-class following, the bonuses were also considerable. Blakeley’s functional camera allowed his talented leads drawn from the rich resources of the Music Hall to display their comedic skills unadorned (BFI web-site entry for John Blakely by Richard Dacre). (1)

My own viewing experience of Off the Dole certainly bears out the points about the lack of structure and loose narrative, though I do note the argument here that this is not merely lack of command of the devices of cinema, but may indicate a preference for a different kind of film experience to those which became dominant in British and US films of the mid-thirties and onwards. The film opens with a brief scene set outside the doorway of a working-class terrace: a character who is also clearly a working-man roughly tells a young woman that she must do better than yesterday and shouts at two children to get on or they’ll be late [for school]. The scene gives an immediate first impression that this is a bully. The credits introduce him as ‘Dick Manners’, the surname presumably an ironic one, while the film poster says ‘ a villain – and proud of it’ (not much left to audience interpretation there). As we later learn, the young woman is his supposed step-daughter Irene Manners and is being sent out to busk by playing her violin.

The film then not surprisingly cuts to a scene set first outside and then inside a Labour Exchange, showing some dozen men in the foyer of the Labour Exchange (rather extraordinarily, given what follows, both the exterior and interior shots look as if they were filmed at a real Labour Exchange). The formal features of the institution are shown, with a long counter labelled ‘Supervisor’, and another doorway signed ‘Transitional Claimants’, with box files visible on shelves. Perhaps surprisingly, the first character to speak and indeed dominate the scene is what would be called ‘an agitator’ in the cast of the play of Love on the Dole. The scene has some comic features, but nevertheless seems to avoid any jokes evidently at the expense of working men or men on the dole, and on the contrary rather seems to take their part. The ‘agitator’ assumes the role of leader and tells the unemployed men that they certainly deserve to have their dole raised to £5 a week (which they are quite happy to agree with) and also that the money should be brought to them – they shouldn’t have to come out in the rain to fetch it at the Labour Exchange. A Ministry of Labour survey, admittedly from two years later, in 1937, found that the average benefit paid to an unemployed man was ’24 shillings and 6d’ (£1.22 1/2), so perhaps £5 was comically optimistic? (2) The speaker asks what the Government has done for the working man in the last six months, and the men answer ‘nothing’. That’s right says the speaker, ‘nothing but blunders and confusions’. He says he always supports the working man; he states that British goods are dear, and asks who makes them? His answer, with which the crowd of claimants agree, is the British Working Man, who he says sees none of the profit. There is some further (comic?) by-play including the speaker saying that we need ‘a new deal’ but that all the working man gets is ‘a lump of wood’ (ho ho!). A dole claimant asks him what a Member of Parliament is, and he replies ‘someone who gives your lives for his country’. The agitator then leads a short song in which all join in with the harmonised chorus which answers the speaker’s repeated questions about British society with the answer ‘the poor old Working Man’. Among the questions he asks are ‘who makes the cars which last you all your life?’ and ‘who was to the fore in the Great World War?’ This is rather extraordinary material to find in British cinema of the time, where representation of working-class discontent was not often attempted by film-makers, nor encouraged by the film censors – indeed as Greenwood found when trying to get Love on the Dole filmed in 1935 and after. Jeffrey Richards describes this opening to the film as ‘consciously and powerfully subversive’ (The Age of the Dream Palace: Cinema and Society 1930-1939, 1987, p.197). I agree this is true of the scene taken on its own, but as part of the overall film this critical edge is considerably tempered by the fortunes of John Willie and Dick Manners. The generally comic context in the scene may also take the edge off the critical commentary by implying none of it is to be taken seriously, but nevertheless the sketch is distinctly not pursuing a ‘we are all in it together’ line, but suggesting a critical working-class perspective, and while there are some comic touches and the whole might be read as a parody of a working-class activist, his points are not wholly unserious, and indeed have some resonances with the speeches of the Love on the Dole activist, Larry Meath, without his underpinning economic theory. The song allows the scene to fade out without any sharp conclusion, before cutting to an exterior scene in which a small crowd surrounds a collapsed young woman on the pavement; a car stops in the road and a well-off young man (clue – he is wearing plus-fours as well as driving a car) leaps out and carries the young woman to his front passenger seat and drives her still unconscious to the hospital.

We then cut back to the Labour Exchange foyer, now empty, and the film introduces a perhaps more individual dole claimant – the George Formby character, John Willey. The other characters at the Labour Exchange wore suits and ties and trilbies or caps or in the ‘agitator’s’ case a bowler, (and all looked notably ‘respectable’, to use that distinction of the time ). Willey in contrast wears the uncommon garments of a loudly-checked jacket and a very old-fashioned low-crowned bowler, which looks more like a parson’s hat than a working-man’s head gear. He is immediately established as an ‘individual’, and thus contrasts to the chorus of unemployed working-men who all supporte the agitator in his suggestions. However, if marked out as different from the other dole claimants, John Willey is not someone who conforms. On coming in both late and via the ‘Way Out’ door, Willey draws the suspicious attention of the policeman who is apparently always on duty inside the Exchange, before observing that the Exchange’s business is getting better – since there are more people on the dole. The policeman is shown as rather non-plussed by this idea. Willey then bumps into a man waiting at the counter to draw his dole – it is Dick Manners from the first scene of the play and he immediately threatens Willey and says he was there first, and has been coming here for six years. Willey replies that he should get a prize for good attendance, but nevertheless cannot resist kicking Manners’ behind when he turns back towards the counter. The superviser comes out of his office and Manners leaves, saying he’ll wait for Willey outside.

Willey now enters into a verbal competition with the smartly-dressed Labour Exchange official and is notably impertinent and combative. However, as it turns out, the Labour Exchange official has bad news for him – Willy fears that he has found him a job, but it is not quite that bad: however his dole is immediately to be stopped. Willey demands to know why and says the superviser must give a reason for sacking him, especially as he has ‘given the best years of his life’ to the dole (the joke here is, of course, Willey regarding the dole as his job, as is his follow up that the superviser must give him a reference – a kind of joke we will meet again in McGill’s comic post-cards). In fact, the official gives two reasons for ending his dole. Firstly it is reported that he has been seen working, hawking firewood on a handcart . ‘Me working’, says Willy – ‘someone’s been kidding you!’: that was he says his furniture during a moonlight flit. Anyway, says the superviser, Willey has not made any attempt to seek employment. Willy says he will only take work in his own trade – selling calendars every leap year (this seems a really feeble joke to me!). Nevertheless, his dole is stopped and he returns home – having run away from Dick Manners who is indeed waiting for him outside the Labour Exchange.

Willey’s home where he lives with his mother is in immediate contrast with Dick Manner’s terrace: it is patently a more affluent and middle-class home from the furnishings and size, and his mother is what might have been called ‘genteel’ at the time (although Willey has pointed out to the Labour Exchange official that she has only a small pension to live on). However, she agrees it was very unfair that they have stopped his dole. It is very clear that while Dick Manners is depicted as a ‘rough’ working man – and there will be further revelations about his ‘villainy’- Willey is meant to be excused what does look like avoidance of work, either because he is a clown or because he is more ‘respectable’, despite his reluctance to conform. As it turns out, Willey has an uncle who wants someone to look after his detective agency while he is away, and Willey’s mother at least thinks her son will be perfect for the job (as earlier suggested, convincing or well-articulated or plausible plotting and narrative progression are not priorities in this film). At this point, John Willey asks if his (clearly doting) mother has put a new string on his ukulele, which is a cue for a song with the first line ‘You’ll Never Catch Me Going Out with Lasses’, which however seems to be listed under his songs as ‘I’m Going to Stick to my Mother’ (there is a clip of his film performance of the song on YouTube: https://youtu.be/F3VzN426_uA?si=mnUC7GtAlxMHNhy2).

In most respects, that is the end of the ‘dole comedy’ in this film, which then switches to a very loose set of sketches based on John Willey’s work as a private investigator. However, one loose end is tied up in that eventually he uncovers the fact that Dick Manners is falsely claiming to be Irene Manner’s step-father, releasing her from his bullying so she can (of course) marry the wealthy young man who took her to hospital in his motor-car (showing the ‘selfless’ benevolence of the upper-classes)?. This reinforces Dick Manners as the ‘rough’ and undesirable working-man, who is in a minor way ‘cheating’ on the dole by relying on some income from the busking of his so-called step-daughter, though John Willey can hardly be seen as his contrary – a ‘deserving’ benefit claimant or working-man. It is noticeable that the manner and dress of Dick Manners, this ‘rough’ working-man, closely resembles that of the similarly portrayed Ned Narkey (played by Martin Walker) in the 1941 film of Love on the Dole (and indeed both are played by actors of upper-middle class origin, judging by the accents clearly underlying their not very convincing ‘working-class’ accents). Overall, this comedy has quite unclear attitudes towards the dole and claimants: it shows early on some sympathy with the frustrations of working-men out of work (if in ways made ambiguous by humour), and then supports its clown-hero in speaking back to bureaucracy before ‘redeeming’ him (?) through work, while maintaining throughout its negative representation of the ‘uncouth’ working-man and ‘dole-cheat’, Dick Manners.

There is a second comic dole film which deserves attention also directed by John Blakeley, and also written by Arthur Mertz, called Dodging the Dole, from the following year (Mancunian Films, 1936). By this time Formby had moved on to a new contract with Basil Dean at Associated Talking Pictures, with whom he made his next and more sophisticated film, No Limit (directed by Monty Banks, with a story contributed by Walter Greenwood, released in October 1935). He was replaced in this next Blakeley production by Roy Barbour and Dan Young. Sadly, I cannot at present give a full analysis of Dodging the Dole since there is no DVD release – I will try to arrange a viewing of the film with the assistance of the BFI in due course. In the meantime, contemporary newspaper reviews give a quite good sense of its contents, which, as with Off the Dole, suggest an affinity with the revue tradition of Dole comedies, and indeed that Blakeley wanted to repeat his (unlikely?) success from that film. The Shields Daily Gazette concisely announced the new film’s charms in the programme at the Pavilion: ‘With BERTINI and BLACKPOOL TOWER BAND. STEFFANI’S 21 SILVER SONGSTERS (Including four South Shields Boys) and many other Excellent Attractions’ (10 November 1936, p.3). In one way, Blakely had certainly gone more upmarket for this second dole film in that he had engaged a much more famous band: Bertini and his Blackpool Tower band were celebrated, will have formed part of thousands of ordinary people’s holiday experiences, and released dozens of 78s during the thirties (many of these can be listened to on YouTube: here is an example of their version of ‘Stormy Weather’ from 1935 posted by a collector of 78s: https://youtu.be/v-m3A8_LyMA, David Sylvestre Collection, lysgauty1, posted 2017).

Kinematograph News, whose main function was to give cinema managers a sense of the attractions of new films so they could make informed commercial judgements about the programmes to run in their own cinemas, was ruthlessly objective in its assessment of this film, including of its technical-aesthetic quality. As with Off the Dole, it is possible that the director Blakeley had a better sense of his (northern working-class?) audience than this metropolitan application of a more contemporary film aesthetic:

DESCRIBED as a ‘merry musical burlesque’, this production has Lancashire written all over it– which probably is sufficient to indicate where its most receptive public are likely to be found. The title seems to point to a comedy of the Means Test, or, at any rate, a farcical treatment of work-shy poverty in a derelict area. There is a slight suggestion of this at the beginning, but the real motive of the film is the introduction of a number of passably amusing vaudeville performers with a strong accent of the County Palatine, whose turns are interspersed with selections by Bertini’s Blackpool Tower Band.

Story. — There is little that can be referred to under this head, the only ‘plot’ that emerges being concerned with the efforts of a couple of comic out o’ works (Barry Barnes and Fred Walmsley) to frustrate the attempt of an equally comic ‘supervisor’ (Dan Young) to find them a job. Nothing comes of this, and the business simply resolves itself into a combination of mannequin parade, cabaret show and Lancashire ‘sing-song’.

Acting — Roy Barbour is the ‘Simple Simon’ type of comedian, with an india-rubber face and an extremely resonant voice. He is plainly capable of putting over better gags than those he is supplied with in this picture. His sallies of humour are often damp squibs, but his footwork in an eccentric dance is a pleasure to watch. His funniest act is that of a ventriloquist’s dummy. Dan Young is ebullient in the part of a ’silly ass’ in a top hat, and Jenny Young excels as a quick-fire soubrette with a tuneful ditty called ‘Waiting at Table’.

Production. — This is mostly of the go-as-you-please variety. The editing of the various incidents seems to have been left to chance, with the result that those who prefer at least a semblance of cohesion, even in a ‘merry musical burlesque’ will be struck by the chaotic manner in which the sequences are presented. Probably this will not matter much to audiences who care less for a well-made picture than for humorous broadsides and back-chat.

Setting and Photography — The camerawork is not ambitious, but might have appeared more effective if more competence had been displayed in the cutting-room. Many of the speaking scenes are shot at too great a distance.

Points of Appeal — The general lowbrow level of the production delimits its possibilities among the critical public. But it may be found useful in industrial centres (2 July 1936, p.33).

This judgement is very like my own of Off the Dole, and indeed it sounds again as if the Dole theme is merely a starting point for the Revue contents – but still that starting point had many unexpected features in that film, and so I certainly want to explore the film in its own right (or anyway its opening scenes . . .) for myself. Kinematograph Weekly clearly states its view that this film will only please a northern working-class audience, and that seems to have been the case with both these films. Perhaps part of the two films’ approach to the dole may be influenced by this – they may not at all want to offend audiences who may have had some experience of the dole, or are aware of its proximity, or anyway are not necessarily negative in their reactions to those who need to claim benefits.

4.3 Two Comic Dole post-cards

The last of these comic texts are two postcards by Donald McGill, who is remembered as the supreme comic post-card artist (though not everyone appreciated his products or considered them ‘art’ at the time – and indeed I am not generally a fan, but make an exception for the following post-cards which I do think are both masterpieces).

This card instantly sets up the contrast between officialdom and the ‘ordinary’ man. Everything behind the wooden counter is straight lines and right angles and in an ‘official’ colour palette (beige, grey, white – with just a hint of alarming red for record files and notices). Behind the counter is the world of bureaucratic literacy: files and record books to ensure everyone’s history, as a claimant anyway, is correct, with the attendant clerk, by definition an expert in accurate recording, in his correct uniform (not that he has any choice), and the two large public notices with the correct terminology in an official font. Pin-stripe trousers, grey morning coat and waistcoat in grey, white shirt with a stiff wing-collar, cuffs just showing, discreet blue bowtie and unobtrusive watch-chain are all worn exactly as they should be by public servants. In fact, the only signs of disorder are that the clerk has a slightly amazed look on his face (but even that is supressed and almost deadpan) and that his pince-nez have apparently leapt spontaneously into the air – his optical aid expressing the surprise their owner cannot.

On the other side of the counter (and nearer to the viewer’s view-point) is a contrary world where a comparative disorder rules (with the exception of the official green linoleum underfoot). The clothes of our claimant and friend show various kinds of disorder – they do not fit perfectly, and nor are they wholly discrete – on the contrary they no doubt make an impression on the clerk and on the viewer of the post-card. Instead of the neat creases of the clerk’s attire, we see multiple wrinkles and folds in places they should not be (according to a more regulated dress aesthetic). Look at the claimant’s trouser knees, and crotch and elbows, and at his jacket pocket! Of course, he has been on the dole for two years so he won’t have been able easily to buy a new suit. However, though the folds no doubt do reflect wear and tear, I do not think they signify threadbareness and poverty so much as a lived-in feel. This man does not even try to make his body conform to the shape of his clothes, but on the contrary his clothes must shape themselves to the needs, and perhaps comfort, of his own particular physique. He needs to bend his knees comfortably so his trousers are slightly too long and loose; and his waistband is ‘relaxed’ to accommodate his stomach. Then there is that lower jacket pocket – it surely contains something slightly too bulky for the jacket to hang properly; what could it be – a sandwich or a hip-flask maybe, something to do with enjoying life rather than regulating it? Then there is the yellow checked waist-coat and the blue and white spotted cravat, unless neckerchief would be a better term. Checks and spots are frequent features of male costume in McGill’s cartoonish world, and I conclude that he thought these were, in themselves, funny, whether sported by upper, middle or working-class characters (perhaps because McGill himself, even while drawing and painting the masters of his cards, was always impeccably dressed in a plain grey suit).

The protagonist’s friend echoes him in some respects – his clothes too have a lived-in and ‘relaxed’ look, the trousers a bit too long and baggy around the ankle, while the loose overcoat is not cut to look smart, but to keep his hands warm in his pockets. His yellow check trousers in one respect echo the other’s red check waistcoat, but can also be seen as clashing. Perhaps for McGill, these loud checks are declarations of joie de vivre and of individuality, as perhaps too is the speaker’s non-standard English? Just to further reinforce the individuality of each claimant, there is a third background figure, mostly obscured by the protagonist’s friend, but not so much as to block all sight of his bright yellow check suit in yet another clashing shade of yellow. The friend looks perhaps more like a typical image of a working-man, with his flat cap, in contrast to the protagonist, who with his bowler looks as if he could have been a shop-keeper, or a bookie, like Sam Grundy. The lean friend is that rare thing among Gill’s older men – someone without a bright red ‘drinker’s nose’, which the protagonist certainly has. In tandem with the contribution of the rich visual detail of the drawing, the caption itself depends for its humour on showing the unexpected assumptions of our protagonist. As far as he is concerned, he is not an undistinguished member of the out-of-work-masses, but an individual with a certain advantageous position, a ‘connection’ which he wishes to pass on to his friend now he no longer needs it! Though he is claiming the dole, this confident speaker wants to do a ‘deal’ with the unemployment exchange clerk and the institution he represents to make sure that the position he has achieved over the last two years is not lost, but passed on! Never-mind state-run systems, and registering for benefit, our protagonist clearly feels he has been lucky (or talented?) in having got this beneficial ‘connection’, and wants to pass on his luck. Not only that, but he talks of going to Australia as if he has chosen to travel a bit – whereas emigration was encouraged by Employment exchanges / dole offices, but was undoubtedly a last resort for many, embarking on a new life which was not bound to be prosperous, but was bound to be extremely unfamiliar (the novel of Love on the Dole depicts Harry looking at a poster in the Labour exchange which contrasts an image of a cowboy and a down-at-heel dole-claimant and displays the legend: ‘Canada for me!’ – p. 156). No wonder the clerk’s pince-nez leap into the air. It seems to me that the image and text tend to incline the viewer/reader to sympathise with the dynamic individuality of the claimant rather than with the mechanics of the system – though the card is only funny because we simultaneously see how outrageous the speaker’s perspective is.

The second card works in many respects in similar ways, with a sharp visual and verbal contrast between a unique ‘demotic’ and official ways of looking at the dole. Again there is a spoken caption from the picture’s leading character, which the reader/viewer is left to interpret for themselves against / with the image.

The picture space is organised rather differently from the first card, with the eye being led along a right to left rather than left to right diagonal, but there is again the division into official and unofficial spheres. Behind the counter is a world of brown, white, black and red, while in front of it is a world less tidy but of more varied colour. The function and rules of the office are set out in black and warning red fonts in three notices, two of which are identical in wording to those displayed in the first post-card, while the third is a ‘Notice on Registration’, outlining the regulations for entering this world. The clerk again, with the forms and pen and inkwell of his trade, represents bureaucratic literacy, but he seems a less superior and indeed more care-worn figure than the elegant pin-striped-trousered clerk of the first image. He has a stiff collar and a black jacket and tie, and looks older, balding and with mere spectacles instead of pince-nez. Perhaps most significantly, he is, unlike our first clerk, completely impassive on hearing the speaker’s request: his spectacles register nothing, and nor does his facial expression. This may be a rather idiosyncratic request from a claimant, but it makes no impression on the clerk – though I can hardly believe he has heard this one before. The claimants have a similar range of individual clothes choices as in the first postcard, with checks and spotted neckerchiefs all present and incorrect, but look to me as if they have much less hopeful facial expressions. Indeed, the speaking claimant looks weary and desperate, with wide-open and red-rimmed eyes, while the two figures behind him in the queue seem patient but very sad. The second man in the brown checked cloth cap does not take any interest in the scene unfolding before him: he just waits his turn. In this image all three claimants have pronounced red ‘drinker’s’ noses, but look much sadder men than the self-confident speaker of the first card. Here we surely see three men who are much more desperate and much more resigned to their fate (‘dole’?). Even the speaker does not really expect to get a ‘rise’ though of course the humour depends like that of the first card on a clash between an official view of the dole and a surprising individual one: the protagonist boldly assumes that being on the dole is like any other job, and that with service comes increased reward. Alas, at the very moment we laugh we also know that the dole is not a job. Despite the joke, this seems a much sadder card than the first. McGill was ‘in politics a Liberal and supported Lloyd George’s social reforms’ so this imaginative empathy seems perfectly likely (Crossley p.119).

McGill designed and painted the original masters for thousands of cards over his long career, with sales of the printed cards in the millions (Bernard Crossley estimates his total artistic output as some 12,000 works and his total card sales as ‘some 350 million’, 5). Even just in particular decades, he seems to have designed hundreds of different cards. However, these two cards with their all male cast and their lack of sexual or other bodily taboo subject matter seem to be quite unusual in his canon. McGill was so prolific that it is very difficult to gain a full command of his oeuvre even in a specific period, but as far as I can see from consulting the standard works on him there is little else quite like these cards – at least among those cards illustrated. Nevertheless, Bernard Crossley suggests there may be others with related interests, though here he is referring to slightly earlier cards from the period between 1919 and 1931, when McGill’s cards were published by the Inter-art Co. This is an example of such a card from that period which I found on the vintage postcard market. I take it that it too was unusual – again there is an all male cast, a complete absence of ‘vulgar’ material, and in this case what I think is a quite complex and pretty inexplicit comic/political point. The card shows what is clearly a worker in heavy industry, with his cap, spotted neckerchief, hob-nailed boots and empty can of cold tea, contemplating his end of week pay-out:

I think the humorous point of this card must, in tandem with the drawing, derive from the juxtaposition of the works’ notice outlining the conditions of the Factory Act of 1905, and the protagonist’s reaction to his end of week pay. Compared to some later thirties wage rates (Larry as a qualified engineer in Love on the Dole brings in 45 shillings a week in 1933, that is £2 and 5 shillings), £10 seems a good week’s pay, even if this working-man’s wife may find it less than she wishes for (or needs – a touch of gender stereotyping here?). The worker’s face is wonderfully expressive, with his surprised and raised eyebrows, wide-open eyes, and his mouth as down as it can be! In contrast to the two later Dole cards with their clear contrast between those behind the counter and those in front of it, the cashier here, despite being firmly separated from the worker by his grille and its small aperture, seems to have a kindly expression – perhaps having overheard the working-man, but slightly disagreeing with his disappointment with ten pounds in crisp notes? I note that both have unusually mild red McGill drinkers’ noses (a feature which the Labour Exchange clerk in the second postcard above does not share with his clients), uniting them somewhat and suggesting a certain shared well-being across the counter in this instance?

The point of this card is enabled, but also complicated by, the works’ notice. As far as I can see, Parliament enacted in 1905 an amendment to the Factory and Workshop Act of 1901, rather than a new act. Both the amendment and the original bill were concerned, very extensively, with improving and regulating the conditions of work in factories especially in terms of safety and hygiene, but were not mainly about the regulation of wages. (4) I wonder if the card dates from the nineteen-twenties when the British economy was (if sporadically) performing more normally, rather than the early thirties, and if its point is that conditions have greatly improved for working people, largely because of regulatory reforms, many led by the Liberal Party during its years in Government between 1905 and 1915. Although the 1901 Factory Act had been passed under a Conservative Government, the 1905 Liberal Government led by Campbell-Bannerman passed many new Acts concerning the (moderate) redistribution of wealth and privilege, including much legislation on pension and welfare reform led by Lloyd-George and Winston Churchill. The 1905 Amendment to the 1901 Factory Act was not perhaps the most major of these reforms, but perhaps McGill sums these significant reforms up in his 1905 Factory Act works notice, even if its reference to the legislation is not wholly accurate (or even intended to be)? McGill was a lifelong Liberal Party supporter, as Bernard Crossley notes, and kept up keenly with public affairs.

However, this particular card seems more optimistic than others from the period according to Crossley’s observations on the Inter-Art Co. years:

The post war world was of course far from being just about having a good time and McGill drew attention to the harsh economic realities of life such as high prices, miners asking for a pay increase, the perils of business, economising, hire purchase, unemployment and the dole (Donald McGill: Postcard Artist, 2014, p.24).

Crossley does himself include an image of one further McGill card from this period with a direct reference to the dole – though it takes a much less sympathetic view to the two (probably) later cards above, and a less sympathetic view of working-class life than the Factory Act card. It shows a street artist (his hair looks unkempt and he wears – again – yellow check trousers and a red spotted neckerchief) sitting on the pavement with three chalk drawings (too small to be seen properly, though one looks like a landscape) propped against the wall. He holds out his cap, but a female passer-by who looks to be herself of working-class status (as imagined by McGill – dressed in a loose-fitting blue and white polka-dot blouse, baggy red skirt, brown boots, and a blue hat with a single feather) is unsympathetic, saying ‘Call yourself an Artist! The only thing you’ll ever be able to draw is the Dole!’ (Crossley, fifth card on the two pages of coloured reproductions of cards dating to ‘1919-1931’ and simply labelled 18).

Clearly the main source of the joke here is the pun on ‘draw’, but the card might suggest that anyone who has to draw the dole is a deserved failure, and does not, unlike the other two cards, grant the man any comic dignity (though there may be a self-reflexive joke about McGill himself as artist too, who will never make it good, which might blunt the critical edge?).

There is one further card which I have seen illustrated which shows an interest in the British welfare system more generally, and this is different in bringing in a more characteristic McGill ‘vulgarity’, with a reference to maternity benefit. The illustration shows a man with a pram containing two babies (twins?) and accompanied by one little girl and one little boy walking alongside, who has met a male friend. The caption captures what the father says in response to a comment from his friend: ‘ “But we must keep having ’em. My wife’s Maternity Benefit is the only income I’ve got!” (fig. 122 in Elfrida Buckland’s The World of Donald McGill, Blandford, London, 1984, p. 69). The male friend looks looks amazed or embarrassed or shocked, for reasons which, as usual in McGill’s work, viewers/readers are left to interpret for themselves. Is the startled facial reaction a result of his friend’s explicit reference to his sex life, or to his completely cynical attitude towards having more and more children, or to the idea that the maternity benefit could possibly match let alone outmatch the expense and labour of rearing four (and potentially more) children? However, this is a post world War Two card, as Buckland points out (p. 68), since Maternity Allowance was first introduced in July 1948 so is not immediately comparable to the two dole cards which there is good reason to date to the Thirties (8). Indeed, the card about the dole-claimant handing over his ‘connection’ is dateable to between 1932 and 1936 since this was the period when McGill’s cards were produced under the ‘XL Series’ title (see Crosley, 2014 p. 28). The second pay-rise card must I am sure date to the thirties, but its publication details of ‘H.B. Ltd’ are less objectively helpful: McGill in theory produced cards for ‘H.B’ (Hutson or Hudson Brothers) only between 1908 and 1910 before becoming dissatisfied with their undisciplined behaviour in private and business life (see Buckley, pp. 26-7, 88-9 and Crossley, p.13). This card on grounds of subject matter and artistic style cannot possibly date from that early a period in McGill’s work. Neither card is likely to date to after 1936 because they both lack the broken coloured border which was part of the brand mark established after McGill re-joined his old (and exploitative) partner Joseph Ascher in the new company of D. Constance Ltd (see Crossley, pp. 31-2).

The earliest and most famous piece of writing about McGill’s postcards is, of course, George Orwell’s essay, ‘The Art of Donald McGill’, first published in the wartime arts periodical, Horizon, in September 1941. Orwell asks a number of questions about McGill’s work, and some of his answers seem helpful if applied to these two postcards and to larger questions about who their audience might have been. Orwell starts with some defining statements about comic postcards (partly because he feels some Horizon readers will not be familiar with them, though he also thinks they are to be found in enormous numbers not just at the seaside, but in many other small shops, and also in every branch of Woolworth’s). He feels that humour is their key component:

A comic postcard is simply an illustration to a joke, invariably a ‘low’ joke, and it stands or falls by its ability to raise a laugh. Beyond that it has only ‘ideological’ interest (Essays, Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition, p.194).

I certainly agree that the relationship between image and words (or ‘punchline’) is central, though I do not agree that these cards necessarily ‘have no artistic pretensions’ (and Orwell admits that ‘many of them are not despicable even as drawings’, p. 194). Orwell suggests in the passage that the cards are of no ‘aesthetic’ interest, and that partly prepares the ground for the last clause above that such a card has ‘only “ideological” interest’. In making this point Orwell is arguing that these texts are in no way capable of artistic or literary analysis, but that their social and political attitudes are of great interest; the second view one that I share partly because my interests are largely (as shown in the whole Not Just Love on the Dole website) in the field of ‘cultural studies’ of which Orwell’s essays are pioneering experiments. Orwell is interested in his essays in a range of popular or widely-consumed texts, in several media, not just those from ‘high-cultural’ contexts. I share that wide focus, which is indeed highly appropriate to Greenwood’s work in partaking of the ‘literary’, but also drawing on popular culture in different media, and which is keen to reach wide and diverse audiences. Nevertheless, I think that formal and aesthetic elements contribute to such texts and studies (as fundamentally I believe Orwell did too – though his arguments in the essay on this do rather waver).

Orwell analyses the commonest topics of humour in such cards, concluding that the most used are jokes abut sex:

Sex. More than half, perhaps three quarters, of the jokes are sex jokes, ranging from the harmless to the all but unprintable (p. 195).

This seems completely accurate. Next come ‘home life’ and ‘lavatory jokes’ (and I reckon most of the latter should be unprintable too), but in fourth place Orwell suggests is ‘inter-working-class snobbery’, which might perhaps be applicable to our two dole cards:

Inter-working-class snobbery. Much in these postcards suggests that they are aimed at the better-off working class and poorer middle class. There are many jokes turning on malapropisms, illiteracy, dropped aitches and the rough manners of slum-dwellers. . . . There are the usual jokes about tramps, beggars and criminals, and the comic maidservant appears fairly frequently. Also the comic navvy, bargee, etc.; but there are no anti-trade-union jokes. Broadly speaking, everyone with much over or much under £5 a week is regarded as laughable. The ‘swell’ is almost as automatically a figure of fun as the slum-dweller (pp. 196-197).

Benefit claimants are not specifically named, and indeed Orwell’s suggestion of the likely audience seems guesswork, though I think it is plausible if not certain: it seems quite possible that enjoyment and laughter at our two dole cards might well be stimulated for those seeing themselves as being in a better (i.e. employed) position, but appreciating the ways in which our two dole-claimants see themselves as also in a kind of job, with its usual privileges, such as they are. Perhaps such an audience might also see the two protagonists as asserting a claim for liberty and individuality, in contrast to those respectable workers who must sustain their position and respect for their betters or risk falling into the lower depths themselves. This understanding of ‘dole comedy’ audiences might perhaps also to apply to others of our texts. Orwell does discuss in sixth place the topic of ‘politics’, but nearly all his references are to pre-First War or to newly developed World War 2 themes, with nothing about the slump or the interwar period – partly in accord with which he says that the ‘implied political outlook is a radicalism appropriate to the year 1900’ (p.197). This would match with McGill’s known Liberalism and his support for the Suffragettes, but as we have seen he was alive to later political and social events too. Orwell makes one broader point about society and the individual in McGill’s cards in terms of a classic fictional opposition:

The Don Quixote – Sancho Panza combination, which of course is simply the ancient dualism of body and soul in fiction form, recurs more frequently in the literature of the last four hundred years than can be explained by mere imitation . . . Evidently it corresponds to something enduring in our civilization, not in the sense that either character is to be found in a ‘pure’ state in real life, but in the sense that the two principles, noble folly and base wisdom, exist side by side in nearly every human being. If you look into your own mind, which are you, Don Quixote or Sancho Panza? Almost certainly you are both. There is one part of you that wishes to be a hero or a saint, but another part of you is a little fat man who sees very clearly the advantages of staying alive with a whole skin. He is your unofficial self, the voice of the belly protesting against the soul. His tastes lie towards safety, soft beds, no work, pots of beer . . . (Essays, pp. 201-2).

Perhaps this too is part of our two dole protagonists identities, with their ‘undisciplined’ clothes and fantasies of some status – they ‘ought’ to accept their underdog status, the fact that they ‘owe’ others for their subsistence, but they don’t quite surrender and lie down.

Though there have been relatively few analysts of McGill’s work, there are one or two others, particularly Elfrida Buckland and Bernard Crossley (quoted above) who are important especially for their clarifications of the sometimes quite complex biography of McGill and of his relationships with a variety of post-card publishers and printers. (8) Both correct some factual errors and misperceptions in Orwell’s early essay, though thereafter they focus mainly on the chronological order of publication, his commercial relationships, and on McGill’s biography. In my view, Orwell’s contemporary analysis of the post-cards remains the most intellectually acute and ambitious exploration of McGill’s appeal and at times seems persuasive (even if it has many Orwellian idiosyncrasies with which I do not concur). However, Bernard Crossley clearly would not agree with me on this (I here clearly risk identifying myself as what Crossley labels a ‘pseudo-intellectual’!):

[Orwell attempted] an analysis of their subject matter, from which he proceeded to draw some very strange conclusions about the English male psyche, the nature of society and of human psychology generally . . . [though] replete with much pseudo-intellectual nonsense and written in somewhat lofty and pretentious language, the article did however do much to draw attention to and bestow a new respectability on an art form and its leading practitioner . . . It’s just a pity that he could not help grafting spurious sociological and psychological significance, in the way that so many intellectuals do, onto McGill’s simple and entertaining comic postcards (p. 38).

Well, as this whole article in itself suggests I do not think that the comic is at all ‘simple’ nor that the meaning of humour and comedy is exhausted by saying that it is something which makes you laugh or gives you a passing moment of pleasure or surprise, and has no further social nor historical significance (and actually Crossley agrees this too in further discussion of McGill’s significance on pp.127-8). Indeed, with humour’s essence usually being a moment of unconscious perception which undercuts or subverts or evades our usual understandings and taboos, the comic is something which is outside the evident, and very much demanding of analysis to be understood (while the moment of laughter can of course be left to itself). (9)

4.4. Comedy in Love on the Dole: Novel, Play, Film.

4.4.1. Novel.

The earliest responses to Greenwood’s novel frequently praise it using words suggesting its ‘tragic’ or deeply shocking dimensions, but they also often also use the word ‘humour’ too. Here are the selection of extracts from reviews and letters to Greenwood which Cape chose to print on the reverse of the dust-wrapper to the first edition (or anyway on the fourth and fifth impressions):

Some responses stress humour, some stress tragedy, some emphasise that both are key elements in the dynamic of the novel. Thus the first review (unattributed to a paper) identifies a group of characters through whom humour operates – ‘Mr Price the Pawnbroker, the chorus of tippling old women, Sam Grundy the bookmaker’ – while expressing amazement that Greenwood could produce anything comic having survived ‘the horror of unemployment in Hanky Park’. The News Chronicle sees the terrible as ‘relieved’ by the ‘rather Hogarthian humour’, while Harold J. Laski and the Bishop of Durham pick out the ‘tragedy of the poor’ and the ‘poignant description of unemployment’. Winifred Holtby most clearly articulates (admittedly in a longer extract) how a combination of the serious and the comic raises the novel above being only ‘propaganda’ and gives a ‘true and terrible picture of what those agreeably abstract phrases The Slump, Unemployment, The Means Test really mean’. She too picks out the ‘chorus of old women’ (as well as noting, as Greenwood himself did, how central to the novel was its response to the Means Test). This selection of early responses does accurately represent most of the reaction to the novel in dozens of reviews across Britain, which frequently identified a dominant tragic strand set against comic elements. Indeed, Greenwood himself in his earliest newspaper interview saw his novel in those terms:

‘I have tried to show what life means to a young man living under the shadow of the dole, the tragedy of a generation who are denied consummation in decency of the natural hopes and desires of youth. I have given some relief to grim realism by introducing the characteristic humour of the older inhabitants of Hanky Park’ (Manchester Evening News, 27 April, 1933, p. 1).

Certainly, the novel does not ignore some comic possibilities, and uses the comic for quite a variety of purposes. While some characters do not much attract humour, including Mr Hardcastle and Mrs Hardcastle as the parents who know they are barely managing to survive, Harry Hardcastle as a frustrated young man, and the serious-minded Larry Meath, there are a small number of characters who are focuses for comic material. Greenwood points to the ‘older inhabitants’, who we should presumably interpret as the so-called ‘chorus’ of four: Mrs Nattle, Ms Dorbell, Mrs Jike and Mrs Bull (they were to be reduced to three in the play). This is an accurate point about the novel – humour and comedy are a little more widely spread in the play and film. When I began to think recently about the comic in Love on the Dole, my first thought was that Sally quite often made comic remarks, part of her optimism and wish to shape her own life in difficult circumstances, but when I looked again at the novel, I realised that actually that is so in the play and film, but not much in the novel. At a very few points early on in the novel, Sally uses humour, but she is noticeably less humorous and gloomier than in the play or film. In a slightly bad-tempered example she suggests in response to Harry’s habitual getting-up moan that he has lost his socks: ‘Wrap ’em round y’ neck of a night, then y’ll know where t’ find ’em,’ (p.16). Harry of course is suffering the torments of adolescence which are worsened for him by poverty and he is made self-conscious of these woes just by the repeated act of dressing every morning: he is wearing the clothes of a school-boy because the Hardcastles cannot afford to buy him adult clothes. Sally understands something of how he feels and when she catches him washing before breakfast and looking in the mirror at his puny and under-nourished body, she teases him, perhaps to try to distract him at least:

She smiled as she glanced at his rolled-up sleeves: ‘Old Samson,’ she said, with a provocative laugh: ‘All muscle.’ He flushed hotly: this was her favourite trick, deriding his miserable muscles when she couldn’t think of anything else to say; had been ever since once she had surprised him, stripped to the waist, standing in front of the small mirror over the slopstone endeavouring to emulate the posture of a notorious wrestler whose picture had lain propped against a jug on the table: it had been, for him, a most embarrassing moment. ‘You leave my arms alone’ (pp.17-18).

However unsatisfactory to Harry, this is a way of trying to cope with material and emotional afflictions which, in the absence of any surplus cash, cannot easily be put right in reality. Later on, Sally has too many worries of her own in the novel to exercise much humour at all.

That leaves us with the ‘older inhabitants’. The novel itself never identifies them as a ‘chorus’, but reviewers quickly applied the description. While each of the women is given a separate character they are most often seen together, and I have never found it that easy to keep them separate in my mind, so the label of ‘chorus’ was both quite accurate and perhaps made it easier for reviewers to talk about them without having to use precious words explaining which was which. However, to clarify the four a little here is an attempt to separate them:

Mrs Jikes: ‘a transplanted sprig of London pride from Whitechapel’ (p. 37); wears a man’s cap and a shawl; referred to as ‘tiny’; tells fortunes and runs séances; plays the accordion at Mrs Scodger’s spiritualist mission. Her husband is alive, but makes little appearance in the novel.

Mrs Dorbell: ‘a beshawled, ancient lugubrious woman’ (p. 32); pawns items for women too ashamed to visit Price’s pawnshop themselves, taking a commission.

Mrs Nattle: ‘a tall restless-eyed old woman, who had fetched, in a bassinette [a pram], nine suits, a dozen frocks, any number of boots and shoes, two wedding rings, [and] three watches and chains’ (p. 33); she, like Mrs Dorbell, ‘oblidges’ her neighbours, for a price, assisting with their business at the pawnshop for a ‘small’ commission.

Mrs Bull: ‘the local uncertified midwife and layer-out of the dead’ (p. 57); referred to as ‘stout’. has been married and bereaved, but is now married again, though her husband, ‘Jack Bull’ is mentioned only once, when Mrs Bull declines to bail him out after the protest march, if he has been arrested. (10)

Apart from Greenwood’s author’s sense that the novel needed some comic relief, it might be that in terms of the economy of Hanky Park these four characters are among the few who have the time and relative freedom from immediate money wants to indulge in playing with humour. While one might expect these older women to be be poorly off, they all run what are very small-scale yet successful ‘businesses’, which ‘help’ (or exploit?) their neighbours, and certainly help themselves (and two in addition have pensions). A chapter title and then commentary within the chapter makes Mrs Nattle’s relative economic independence (as well as its exploitative base) explicit. The title of Chapter 6 is ‘Low Finance’ and there is an immediate gloss on this:

The soiled card suspended in the window [of Mrs Nattle’s house] by a piece of dirty string said:

AGENT FOR THE GOOD SAMARITAN CLOTHING CLUB.

Beneath appeared in Mrs Nattle’s laborious handwriting:

Pawning on commission. Naybores oblidged.

The triple underscoring [which I have had to replace with bold in the WordPress editor!] had a cryptic significance. It referred to one of Mrs Nattle’s illicit and profitable activities. Though this was conducted on very orthodox lines; to be precise, none other than those of the Bank of England’s or of any other large money-lending concerns . . . Conducted on very orthodox lines. Interest was charged, security – note of hand, or, preferably, a more material asset – demanded. The markets, or stocks that she watched, and from which she formed her conclusions as to whether or no her prospective patron was safe for a loan – or overdraft – was the labour market. If a woman was reputable and her husband working and of the kind who meets his obligations faithfully, that patron’s stock, as it were was gilt edged and a short term loan (seven days) would be forthcoming. (pp. 102-3).

Of course, part of the point of the chapter title is that, in Greenwood’s view, this illegal money shark is really in no way different in her business principles than those who practice ‘high finance, including national banks. Though only Mrs Nattle is specifically compared to the Bank of England the whole of the chorus have each their own ways of doing better than most in Hanky Park (of course with the exception of those who exploit poverty at one further level up: Mr Price, the pawnbroker, Alderman Grumpole, ‘the money-lender proprietor of the Good Samaritan Clothing Club’, and Sam Grundy, the on-street bookmaker). Greenwood’s commentary on Mrs Nattle and the Bank of England is in itself humorous in a satirical mode, using a high/low comparison to strip away apparent differences in situation and status. Note how the passage uses or parodies the language of banking, finance and economics to describe how Mrs Nattle makes her financial decisions: ‘interest’, ‘security’, ‘note of hand’ ‘a more material asset’, ‘markets’, ‘stocks’, ‘loan’, ‘overdraft’, ‘labour market’, ‘reputable’, ‘gilt-edged’ and ‘short-term loan’.

Nearly all the humour arising from this chorus of four does so from their automatic addiction to putting their own interests first and above all other possible human (and humane) considerations (with some additional comic touches from the equally dependable fact that despite their apparently shared interests, they are always in fact in competition with each other too). Thus there is Mrs Dorbell’s surreptitious pawning of her pension-book at Mr Price’s pawnshop – something noted by Mrs Nattle who keeps her peer under constant surveillance, lest she miss a trick. Both pretend innocence while eventually and discreetly raising the topic between them. Mrs Nattle starts by saying she is surprised Price accepts pension-books, ‘bein’ agen law as is printed on book back an’ him bein’ a churchgoer an’ a magistrate’ (p. 34). However, Mrs Dorbell soon moves beyond this superficial point about respectability (and perhaps even, ethics) and moves on to the proper kind of business-discussion which such like-minded people should apply to such a topic:

‘Well, he knows that if he teks their pension books i’ pawn they can’t draw their pensions till book is redeemed,’ a nod and a wise look: ‘Y’can stay in house when y’ can’t afford t’ get y’ clo’es out o’ pawn,’ emphatically: ‘But y’ can’t afford t’ miss y’ ten bob pension for sake of half a crown,’ muttering: ‘Which is wot he lends on pension books.’ Pause. Still keeping her gaze fixed on Mrs Nattle she jerked her head towards the other side of the counter and raised her brows: ‘An’ ’e knows it, Mrs Nakkle, ’e knows it. Be ’e church goer, magistrate or King Dick hissel’, ’e knows it. An’ he’ll oblige a lady wot asks him privit’ an’ proper when nobody’s about’ (p. 35).

Of course, as they both know ‘business ethics‘ must be applied to this kind of thing, and so they can be assured that if approached in the proper way (note the language of apparent respectability: ‘lady’, ‘privit’ an’ proper’) – and particularly when nobody can overhear him say anything about such an outrageous act as taking pension books as pledges.

In fact, there is barely any subject of conversation among the four where they can reveal their real interests or motives because they are always in an endless competition. While profit no doubt always comes first, the game and its bluffs and double-bluffs I think also provides them all with free entertainment at all times. For example, when Mrs Nattle fancies a little ‘nip’ [of whisky], which is pretty much at all times of the day – including right after doing her business at Price’s pawnshop early in the morning – she cannot just say so, but must embed her want beneath a rigmarole about the restricted pub-opening hours introduced in Britain during the First World War, for which she blames Lloyd-George, before eventually revealing what her peers already know – that she runs another small enterprise selling ‘nips’ at threepence a carefully-measured shot to ‘friends’ only (she always pours herself an ‘outsize nip’, p.108). I am not certain what her profit on this little business was likely to be, but we can probably assume that it at very least substantially subsidised her own whisky habit. Of course, selling spirits retail in her home without a licence was just as illegal as her money-lending business.

There are further examples of how the automatic self-interest of the chorus leads to a humorous, but also critical, contrast between their ways of thinking and those practised by more sympathetic humans (whose number the novel’s reader is invited to swell by the ways the text constructs their relationship to the whole caste of characters).

However, one of the chorus, though generally also motivated by self-interest, does complicate things somewhat by sometimes making critical comments showing a wider awareness, and indeed being honest-speaking, though she is still in various ways a source of comedy, and perhaps still an equivocal ‘friend’ to the people of Hanky Park. This is Mrs Bull, a ‘handywoman’ who assists the people of Hanky Park at birth and after death, for a fee. For example, as to self-interest, take her completely ‘honest’ explanation at the séance to the deceased Jack Tuttle about her actions while laying him out:

‘Oh,’ said Mrs Bull: ‘Y’ there. Jack, lad, a’ y’?’ In the darkness, her companions could not see the roguish twinkle in her eyes: ‘Well, hark t’ me. When Ah laid thee out, lad, Ah found half-crown i’ th’ pocket an’ Ah wus hard up so Ah tuk it. Ah knew tha wouldna need it where tha’s gone, an’ Ah’m on’y tellin’ y’ this so’s y’d not think Ah’d pinched it. How d’y’ find things where tha art, Jack? Is it owt like that tha thowt it’d be?’ (p. 99).

Of course, she has not pinched the half-crown! And having contacted Jack, she can’t resist asking him how it is in the after-life! However, she can also sometimes suggest wider perspectives than her three companions. When Mrs Dorbel shares her version of the dream which sustains and disappoints so many in Hanky Park – a big win on the horses in the Irish Sweepstake, Mrs Bull states what would happen in reality – a consequence of Mrs Dorbell’s own addictions and character:

Eee! Fancy me winnin’ thirty thousan’ quid! Ah’d buy meself a fur coat an’ …’

‘Aye,’ Mrs Bull grunted, quite unable to visualize the possibility: ‘Aye, an’ Ah’d be layin’ y’ out in a month, drunk t’ death, fur coat an’ all’ (p.100).

Or there are her observations, while having her nip with the others, on her own livelihood and the behaviour of the current generation of young people in Hanky Park:

‘Yaa – Ah don’t know what’s comin’ o’er folk these days. Ah remember time when ne’er a day hardly passed without there was a confinement or a layin’ out to be done,’ bitterly: ‘Young ’uns ain’t havin’ childer as they should. An’ them as die’re bein’ laid out by them as they belong to which weren’t considered respectable in th’owld days. When Ah was a gel a ’ooman wasn’t a ’ooman till she’d bin i’ childbed ten times not countin’ miscarriages. Aaach! How d’ they expect a body t’ mek a livin’ when childer goin’ t’ school know more about things than we did arter we’d bin married ’ears?’ Nobody had an explanation (pp.106-7)

Presumably people are laying out their own dead on occasion because they cannot afford Mrs Bull’s fee. The second part of Mrs Bull’s complaint, however, is discretely lamenting a growth of knowledge about birth control and a decline in profitable attendance at childbirths (and assistance with miscarriages). There is a quiet (but noticeable if you look) strain of discussion in the novel about how lack of access to birth control contributes to the poverty (and reproduction of poverty) in Hanky Park. (11) Here Mrs Bull runs counter to that line of thought in her own self-interest, but actually when helping Helen after she has had to hastily marry Harry Hardcastle, and agreeing to do some paid child-care, she offers advice (if very vague) about birth control:

Ah’d pay y’ if y’d see to her durin’ day for me.… Would …?’ ‘

Aye, lass, she’ll be all right wi’ me.’ She gazed at Helen, steadfastly, ‘An’ if y’ tek my advice, lass, y’ll mek this one y’ last. One’s too many sometimes where workin’ folk’re concerned. ’Tain’t fair t’ you an’ ’tain’t fair t’ t’ child. Luk at Mrs Cranford. One reg’lar every year, an’ half of ’em dead. An’ Kate Narkey shapin’ same way. Yah, them two fellers ought t’ be casterated.’

Helen shifted uncomfortably, glanced at the clock then said, in genuine alarm: ‘Ooo, luk at time.… Harry’s tea’ll ne’er be ready when he comes’ (p.254).

The equally inexplicit version of this conversation in the play version was specifically picked out by one of the film censors for the BBFC in 1934 as something which must be completely cut in any film version. It may be that in the earlier conversation Mrs Bull feels she must keep up with Mrs Nattle and Mrs Dorbell in a display of self-interest above all. Also, one might note that an increase in knowledge about birth control does not actually feature anywhere in the novel, and Mrs Bull may know this very well – Helen and Harry, and Mrs and Mr Cranford, would seem to know nothing of it, and Helen’s complete unwillingness to even acknowledge Mrs Bull’s advice is made very clear. Part of Mrs Bull’s role may be to sometimes disrupt the comic pattern of automatic self-interest in the chorus, and this has the benefit of slipping in material very difficult to publish in a novel under a penumbra of comedy (notice how the malapropism ‘casterated’ ends the speech with a ‘joke’ about working-class pronunciation – though of course Mrs Bull knows there are other methods of birth-control, even then). While contemporary reviews and indeed critics since have often continued to treat the chorus of older women as a wholly collective character, the Greenwood critic Jack Windle made the important argument in an article in 2011 that Mrs Bull was in fact a key and important character, offering more immediate and practical social and political leadership in Hanky Park after the death of the working-class intellectual, Larry Meath. (12)

Humour and comedy in the novel of Love on the Dole are not marginal effects, but part of the complex ways in which it represents poverty and unemployment in Hanky Park. The chorus are convincing portraits of small-scale ‘entrepreneurs’, who exploit their clients, give them ways of surviving short term, and systematically contribute to the continuance of the subsistence culture and economy of Hanky Park, and they are also comic creations whose automatism helps put readers in the position of thinking differently about those enduring the anxiety and suffering of sustained poverty and unemployment. Often, as a result, the comedy of Love on the Dole has a tragicomic mode, since what is in one way comic is from another perspective part of the ‘tragedy of the poor’ (as Harold J. Laski put it – see the Love on the Dole dust-wrapper above).

4.4.2. Play.

The tragicomic is also a strong element in the play adaptation, but we know that when Greenwood and the playwright Ronald Gow met in 1934 to discuss co-writing the play, they made some (more or less?) joint decisions about the nature of the piece which had impacts on the degree of the tragic and comic in the adaptation. Gow published at least three versions of what happened at their meeting (while Greenwood gave no account), and comments in each may bear on their discussion of the genre potential of the novel as a play. The first newspaper article certainly suggests that Gow saw both tragedy and comedy as key combined elements, and also partly derived their presence in the novel from Greenwood’s biography:

Love on the Dole has been adapted for the theatre by Ronald Gow, the author of the ‘brilliant failure’ Gallows Glorious. Mr Gow, after reading the story, and recognising that there were both ’tears and laughter in it’, coupled with sincerity, wrote to the author, and they met at a Manchester street corner. This is what the adaptor says of the meeting: ‘He told me to look for a ‘scrawny, half-starved sort of person; I discovered a fresh-complexioned young man, quietly humorous, with eyes that told that their owner had looked on suffering and suffered. We had a cup of coffee and talked (‘Music, Drama and Cinema’ column by ‘D.G’, Hull Daily Mail, 29 June 1934, p.12).

The somewhat later account by Gow in the New York Times emphasised that he thought the play should be highly approachable for audiences and that this was centrally an issue of genre:

It seemed to me that a play about unemployment would not appeal to the general public, nor did I feel that the English people cared sufficiently about the tragedy in their midst to see it on the stage. ‘But’, I said, ‘if we can make a British audience laugh … they won’t mind how much we make them weep. It’s the mixture they love . . . two months later our play was written’ (New York Times, 23 February 1936, p.XI).

This strongly suggests that Gow felt that the play version would need more humour to succeed, but he clearly also wanted to retain the tragic-comic mode of the novel. A third account by Gow of the crucial meeting gives it as a more equal agreement between the two that the play needed to be accessible: ‘we agreed about the play . . . but with one condition. We were to make money out of it, so it mustn’t be a high-brow piece. I think he had an idea I was some sort of egg-head!’ (quotation of this account by Gow in a TV Times article by Laurence Marcus about the 19 January 1967 Granada TV adaptation of the story).

Whichever of the authors led on this change, there is no question that the play version (strictly the two somewhat different versions produced at Manchester and that produced in London) builds in more humour, not only into the already comic potential of the chorus, but also into Sally’s part, and on one occasion into that of Mrs Hardcastle. One quite specific development of comic material is the Shorts motif. In the novel Larry invites Sally to go rambling on the moors on a Sunday with the Labour club. She accepts and she tells her mother the next morning enjoyed it very much:

‘Oh, Ah love way he talks. An’ he’s so – so – nice. Ah ne’er enjoyed meself so much in all me life,’ brightly: ‘An’ he asked me would Ah go next time!’ fervently: ‘Ooo, Ah do hope Ah get some overtime in at mill. Ah want t’ get a rig out like rest o’ the girls. Ah felt proper out of it against them and their heavy boots an’ jerseys and short trousers’ (p.96).

Clearly Sally wants to be dressed in proper rambling gear, and fit in with Larry’s Labour Club friends. Also, as she goes on to say next, thinks she will look good in shorts. Her mother is clearly a bit shocked at the idea and invokes her father’s disapproval, but Sally shows a flash of independence:

Mrs Hardcastle looked at Sally with dubiety: ‘D’ y’ think y’ father’d like y’ t’ be dressed like that, Sal?’ she murmured. Sally frowned: ‘Aw, who cares what he thinks? Ah’ll buy ’um an Ah’ll wear ’um. Let him mind his own business.’ She folded her arms and glared at the fire. Then her expression relaxed as she pictured herself dressed in the manner desired. Every item would become her (pp.96-7).

In the novel that is all anyone has to say about hiking shorts. However, in the play the shorts become a comic (and also patently erotic) topic which is revisited several times. The sequence of events in the play adaptation is quite different from that in the novel; in the novel Sally tells her mother about her walk on the moors with Larry on p. 96 (Part Two, Chapter 5) , while in the play the first conversation about the ramble takes place in Act I, four pages into the play-text, and is between Sally and Larry – it has no equivalent in the novel. The shorts play a considerable part in their conversation about walking on the moors:

LARRY: Listen. Sal, when are you coming up on moors again?

SALLY. Ee, that was champion!

[. . .]

LARRY. If you like it why don’t you come? You’re welcome, you know.

SALLY. Oh, I don’t like . . .

LARRY. Don’t like what?

SALLY. You paying for me on t’train.

LARRY (laughing). I can manage that.

SALLY. And the clothes them other girls wore.

LARRY. D’ y’ mean shorts and jerseys?

SALLY. Yes.

LARRY. Oh, there’s no need to wear them if you don’t like them. Besides, they don’t suit everybody.

SALLY. But Ah do like ’em. (indignant) And they’d suit me, too!

LARRY. Oh, of course . . . I didn’t know . . . I’m sorry if . . .

SALLY. Ah should think you are! Of course, if y’ think Ah haven’t got figure for shorts and things, why don’t y’ say so?

LARRY. Sally, I never said . . . You’d look marvellous in anything. Perhaps if we could borrow . . .

SALLY. AW, don’t worry, lad. Ah’m only kidding. P’raps Ah’ll be getting some overtime at mill then Ah’ll be able to buy some short trousers an’ come wi’ y’.

LARRY. That’ll be great.

SALLY. But I can’t promise y’ fine talk like them other girls. Ah know nowt o’ Bark and Baytoven an’ yon feller they call G.B.S. Is he a friend of yours? (Cape edition, 1935, pp.16-17).

The dialogue progresses comically through a series of misunderstandings and apparent moments of shyness and outward confusion towards plainer speaking and mutual admiration. The shorts and their imagined impact matter a lot to Sally, while the apparently tactful and considerate Larry messes up his response completely! Sally noticeably though asserts her independence and agency in the last speech – she’ll come walking again when she has earned enough to buy herself some shorts. They are though essential to her walking pleasure – not an incidental addition, partly because they will mark her as fully part of the Labour Club ramblers, which is a concern to her because she does not understand their cultural references. In the novel, this is something she reflects on privately in her thoughts (p.97), while here it is transformed into speech, and indeed becomes what seems a patronising class-based joke at her expense (Gow’s hand, perhaps?).

Next the shorts come up again later in the first Act when Harry tells Sally he can’t go on wearing his ‘knickerbockers’ now he is sixteen and working at Marlowe’s:

SALLY. It’s a rum business!

HARRY. It’s nowt to laugh at.

SALLY. You wantin’ long trousers an’ me wanting shorts.

HARRY. You in shorts! Sally, y’re barmy!

SALLY. You wait. Ah’ll show y’ (p.27).

Sally wanting to adopt the dress of the Labour Club women and men ramblers is certainly seen as transgressive by her mother (on imagined behalf of her father) and her brother, and not part of normal Hanky Park dress-codes. However, her determination to go ahead with this shows an independence and agency greater than that of Sally in the novel, as well as associating her with a ‘cheeky’ and comic theme.

Indeed, there is further development in the play of a comic element not in the novel, when Sally tells her mother about the pleasures of the walk. As in the novel, she tells her mother that Larry ‘knows names of all the birds’ (novel, p. 96) , but in the play Mrs Hardcastle is given a response to this:

MRS. HARDCASTLE. Eh, ain’t that nice, now. Though Ah can’t see as it’s much good knowing names of all t’ birds.

SALLY. Better than knowing names o’ horses.

MRS. HARDCASTLE. Aye, eddication’s like that. Knowing a lot o’ things as don’t really matter. (ACT 1, p.31).

Of course, there is a serious point here (in with the moment of laughter) about a point of view likely to be at variance with that of many audience members: that the people of Hanky Park are so deprived of access to anything outside Hanky Park that any knowledge outside of that, anything not of immediate use, hence learning in general, is seen as of no use (though Sally makes the sharp point that such learning may be more beneficial than the nearest Hanky Park learning she can identify – the names and form of racehorses). However, as with the ‘joke’ above about Bark and Baythoven, this seems more class-based, or rather class-biased, than anything in the novel. Surely this is inviting those of a ‘superior’ class to laugh at the assumed shortcomings of a ‘lower; class, an ancient form of comedy going back at least to Shakespearian period comedy and before that to the classical origins of comic drama, but that literary genealogy does not make it any more acceptable in a play championing working people. Were there really no lovers of nature and ornithologists in a place like Hanky Park? Is Larry completely unique? (in fact there was Walter Greenwood at least, though perhaps he was exceptional too, and a part model for Larry – see ‘Greenwood Come Home’ interview (Geoffrey Moorhouse, the Guardian, 1967) and discussion of nature in Greenwood’s non-fiction 1951 book on the county of Lancashire in Walter Greenwood’s Other Books ).

After this interchange between Sally and her mother, the shorts make another appearance in an almost verbatim adaptation of the conversation the two had in the novel about Sally’s ramble with Larry, but one further partly comic speech is newly given to Mrs Hardcastle: ‘Onct [once] y’r character was as good as gone when y’ wore short skirts. But short trousers . . . My!‘ (p.33). Part of the joke is presumably that Sally’s mother is behind the times, and out of touch, though as we shall see reviewers of the play (or their press photographers anyway) also found Sally’s shorts of considerable interest, rather than seeing them as ‘normal’ dress. Sadly, a few pages later in the play when Mr Hardcastle has had to agree that Harry is not fit to be seen and must have an adult suit on the never-never from the Good Samaritan Clothing Company, Sally realises any overtime she earns will have to be donated to paying that off, so ‘it’s goodbye to them shorts o’ mine’ (Mrs Hardcastle is relieved: ‘there’d be too much talk . . . with you walkin’ about half-naked’, play p.38).

Luckily, however, Harry wins his threepenny treble bet with Sam Grundy and is able to repay Sally’s generosity: ‘Go on, get y’shorts, an’ anything else y’ve a mind to’ (play p.67). The next appearance of Sally’s shorts in Act II, Scene 2 is not verbal but visual – it is the only scene in the play set outside Hanky Park, when the couple go rambling on the moors for the second time, and following Larry up on the stage scenery rock (SALLY appears, in hiking shorts and shirt).

The scene has no equivalent in the novel, which does not directly represent Larry and Sally on either their first or second rambles. Though Sally says at one point, ‘You haven’t said y’like me shorts’ (he does), the scene, though it begins with some comic moments is not mainly comic, but rather a serious scene, with Sally (if not Larry) unusually for the play speculating about the possibility of the divine, and expressing a sense of the romantic sublime, in this scene titled in the Cape edition ‘Worship in the High Places‘, though that phrase is never actually spoken on stage. There are also forebodings of tragedy to come, with a fall from this height of happiness and temporary escape from Hanky Park strongly suggested in the final speech of the scene:

SALLY: It’s different up here now the sun’s gone down. Ah think this place has changed. It’s growing dark – and oh, Larry, Ah’m afraid . . .Ah’m afraid . . . ( p.81).

The shape of tragedy plainly alluded to here, with the fall of the hero (or heroine?) from a high point in their trajectory, is not made so explicit in the novel, but one notes here the generic shifts of the scene from comic to sublime to hints of tragedy to come, as indeed does develop in Act III. Scene I, titled in the Cape edition: (Catastrophe).

Indeed, in the third Act there are more references to a tragic fall, though these are also subject to a grim and ironic humour largely because of who they are spoken by:

MRS DORBELL. Still ridin’ her high horse, is she. You mark my words, that girl’s gunna have a fall. She’s gunna have a fall, that she is. (p.89).

Of course, Mrs Dorbell’s way of looking at a fall on Sally’s part is not everyone’s, and indeed, apart from the comic literalism of the fall from ‘her high horse’, her idea of a ‘fall’ is not taking up a money-making opportunity, such as Sam Grundy’s offer of the post of ‘house- keeper’. This tragicomically overlaps not so much with the pattern of Larry’s classical tragic fall, as with Eve’s fall in Eden, but Mrs Dorbell does not seem to know anything about that fall. Sally herself is not present at this scene – Sam Grundy is in his odd view (and Mrs Dorbell’s) doing the ‘respectable’ thing of asking Sally’s parent if her daughter will become his ‘kept woman’, as if he were offering marriage. Mrs Hardcastle states clearly that Sally ‘won’t fall Sam Grundy’s way’, while Mrs Dorbell makes equally clear what her ‘ethics’ are based on:

MRS DORBELL. There now. It’s like sweeping money off doorstep. huh! It’s well to be some folk as can afford to have notions. Why the man’s fair made of brass! (p.88).

The grim comedy here stems from Mrs Dorbell’s entirely distorted confusion of good or moral or even sensible behaviour with behaviour which is money-making, at whatever cost.

As Act 2 goes on, things do undoubtedly become grimmer: Larry fears the worst will happen to those who join the protest march against the Means Test, and goes to the march with Mrs Hardcastle do his best to prevent harm despite his severe cough. Sally fears for him and does her best to stop him going, but fails because of his strong sense of duty to his fellow-workers. Nevertheless, while Larry is out at the march, Sally’s good humour and its sustaining effects on others continues much more strongly than it does in the novel (where neither of the two following speeches appear in any form). Thus when the pregnant Helen comes to see her to explain that at the most basic level she and Harry cannot afford to get married, Sally turns it into a joke and in the same moment provides material assistance:

HELEN. Yes, but . . . we can’t get married. We’ve no money for that.

SALLY. Let’s see, what does it cost? Is it seven an’ six?

(She goes to her coat behind the door and takes out her purse)

Or is that a dog-licence? Marriage licences last for ever though, so its cheaper than keeping dogs. Ah know some marriages as wouldn’t last long if you had to tek out a new licence every year.

(She holds out a ten shilling note). (p.105)

This is a serious critique of the fragile estate of marriage in Hanky Park, but also at the same time a comic and actual lightening of Helen and Harry’s desperation. This exchange has been preceded by Sally’s equally serio-comic commentary on love on the dole:

SALLY. Ah wonder how much longer we women’ll tek to learn that living and loving’s all a damn swindle? Love’s all right on t’Pictures, but love on t’dole ain’t quite the same thing.

HELEN. Ah won’t give up Harry.

SALLY. Ah’m not asking you to. I reckon that’s all part of the swindle. We can’t give ’em up, else wouldn’t we have a bit o’ sense an’ do wi’out love same as we do wi’out fine clothes, and motor cars an’ champagne? Would we bring children into Hanky Park if we weren’t blasted lunatics? (p.104-5).

Sally realises that one of the things which sweetens life even in Hanky Park also reproduces poverty and entrapment (the speech of course also contributes to that quiet theme about the dire consequences of ignorance of birth control in such a poor community). Love is a luxury in Hanky Park and in actuality if not in imagination not at all in a different realm from other material conditions – those who cannot afford goods cannot afford relationships either. Of course, this is one of the morals of Love on the Dole which Greenwood himself drew very explicitly in his very first interview about the novel, and which I quoted earlier in this article: ‘[it is] the tragedy of a generation who are denied consummation in decency of the natural hopes and desires of youth’ (Manchester Evening News, 27 April, 1933, p. 1).

These conversations with Helen are, however, the last humorous moments for Sally. Next comes the news that Larry has been knocked unconscious by the police and been taken to hospital seriously injured. Characteristically and in line with Gow and Greenwood’s plans for the play as a mixture of tears and laughter, her tragedy unfolds against simultaneous comedy. Mrs Jike comes home bearing in triumph a policeman’s helmet and declaring her enjoyment of the fight:

MRS JIKE. Hey, gels, look what Oi’ve got! Shut the door quick! Eh, what a time Oi’ve had! We rolled him in the mud, an’ I danced on ‘is stummick! It’s as good as being in Whitechapel again! (p.108),

However, for Sally there is nothing to enjoy after this point, and it is quickly reported that Larry has died of his injuries offstage: ‘Well, that’s put paid to that. There’s nowt but dreams now’, says Sally (p.112).

Act 3 centres on Sally’s ‘arrangement’ with Sam Grundy, made partly because she has little hope of anything better, but mainly to save her parents and her brother and Helen from descent into even direr poverty with no hope of escape. Her mood and situation in this last act allow no humour – as the stage direction on her first entrance specifies: (her manner has hardened) (p. 115). Her tragedy though continues to reach its climax against the heartless and uncaring comedy of the ‘Chorus’. ‘Fuss y’ mek o’it’, says Mrs Dorbell to Mrs Hardcastle, while the kindlier (?) Mrs Jike enjoys the unprecedented appearance of a taxi in North Street which comes to take Sally to the station: ‘Makes it real wicked, don’t it? A motor car!’ (p.116). Mrs Bull engages more sympathetically with Sally’ situation, though I find it difficult to be persuaded that her analysis is correct, despite some alignment with what Sally herself says. Clearly, Mrs Bull’s advice, given to Mrs Hardcastle rather than Sally directly, is not at all comic, but serious and well-intended, if hardly in accord with either conventional ideas of respectability or female agency or happiness:

MRS BULL. Ah dunno, Some folks don’t know when they are well off. See here, Mrs Hardcastle, She’ll tek no hurt. Sally ain’t the kind. She’d ha’ been a sight worse off hangin’ about here doin’ nowt but thinkin’. If y’ want to know, it was me as ‘inted to Sam Grundy that she’d tek no hurt if she went away for a while . . . Three or four months at that there place o’his in Wales, wi’ all nice weather in front o’ her – why, woman, she’ll be new-made o’er again. Allus she wants is summat to mek her forget. Everlastin’ thinking about that Larry Meath . . . It’s more than flesh an’ blood can stand. Use y’r head woman, use y’r head. (p.114).

This puts something of a gloss on Sally’s situation, especially by avoiding confronting the unpleasant fact that Sally will not just be spending time at Sam Grundy’s house in Wales but will be expected to give in to his sexual demands. Mrs Hardcastle however makes this quietly clear with her response: ‘There’s t’other thing’ (p.114). Nevertheless, Mrs Bull says this is better than suicide, which she suggests is an possible alternative outcome if Sally had to stay in Hanky Park. In fact, in the next part of this scene, it is clear that the ‘hardened’ Sally has suffered. When Greenwood re/visited Sally in Wales in his little-noticed short story sequel to Love on the Dole, he makes it clear that she is in many ways unhappy with her situation, though also defiant of Grundy, but that she also prefers it to being poverty-stricken in Hanky Park (see: What Sally Did Next: Greenwood’s Sequel to Love on the Dole (‘Prodigal’s Return’, John Bull, January 1938)). The play ends with the argument between Sally and her father about ‘respectability’, where she tells him that will not be an option for them if they are destitute. The play’s final lines frame the male unemployed worker who has lost his traditional identity as breadwinner and protector of his family as the central tragic figure, though Mr Hardcastle has had much less stage-time than Sally:

HARDCASTLE (an angry beaten man). Oh, God, Ah’ve done me best! Ah’ve done me best, haven’t Ah? (p.126).

Most reviews of the play saw it as a successful hybrid of tragedy and comedy – however, one review of a repertory production felt tragedy was the dominant mode:

‘Some people found the play amusing. How they could be moved to laughter I cannot understand, for tragedy in full measure hovered over even the lighter passages (Richmond Herald on production in Barnes by the Riverside Repertory Company, 10 june 1939, p.10).

4.4.3. Film.

The film differs substantially from both the novel and the film in the sequence in which it presents the narrative, but is closer to the play in its upping of the comic in the tragi-comic mixture, and in much of its humour, particularly again through the characters of Sally and through the ‘Chorus’. The film opens with the Hardcastle family’s beginning of another working day. This is considerably more genial at first than the opening of the novel, and presents humour as part of Harry and Sally’s everyday relationship. Sally tells the sleepy Harry to ‘come on, Dopey’. and when he says he thought it was Sunday, she replies with what seems to be a proverb, ‘Lose a day lose a friend’. However, their father Mr Hardcastle could not be said to be readily open to the comic – on the contrary he is angry from the moment we first see him come home from his night-shift at the pit, superficially because Harry and Sally are not up yet and ready to go to work, but fundamentally (as soon becomes obvious) because of the all-embracing frustrations of his life, with too little to live on, and the bare subsistence which is the best he can do for his family. There is a little more comic byplay between the siblings as Sally dares Harry to ask about his desperate need for a new suit when they can both see that their father is not in a good mood (indeed he has nothing to feel good about). There is an interchange between Harry and his father which includes a joke on the son’s part but is overall an angry exchange. Mr Hardcastle says Harry can have a new suit when things look up – the papers say ‘Trade is Turning the Corner’. Harry replies that he knows one thing – he is not fit to turn the corner in current clothes. The general rule of both novel and play that there is very little humour linked to Mr Hardcastle persists in the film too; humour mostly arises in association with Sally, and as we might expect, in scenes featuring the chorus of Mrs Dorbell, Mrs Nattle, Mrs Jike and Mrs Bull (though reduced to three in the play – Ms Nattle is economised on – the older women are restored to full power in the film). Harry has the odd association with the comic, though often this stems from his naive hopes, and Larry shares some flashes of humour with Sally, and with his workmates – mainly in this case when discussing or disagreeing about politics.

The next scene outside the pawnshop brings out the humour which the Chorus both create and use in their business relationships (they leave nothing unexploited). A crowd od women wait outside the pawnshop and are clearly impatient to exchange their goods for ready money so they can buy food. Members of the chorus soon distinguish themselves from the crowd, and show their own characteristic leadership. First of all, Mrs Nattle, with the pram she uses to carry the large mass of ‘oblidged’ neighbours goods, goes straight to the front of the queue and demands they open up because it is perishing cold. We then cut to the inside of the pawnshop and to Alderman Price who reprimands his snuffly and clearly frozen boy clerk (not Harry Hardcastle as in the novel, but presumably his equally miserable successor) for ‘slovenliness – always to be deplored especially in one so young’. This is because the ill-clothed boy has his hands in his pockets, while Price is dressed in overcoat and scarf and wears thick woollen gloves. This is a grim joke about those who can afford choices and those who cannot – and as in every frame of the film shows the consistent attention to detail in setting, costume and dialogue. This scene also suggests how important visual humour is to the film – and it is something I probably took too little account of in my section above on the play. Though the actor playing Alderman Price is not even credited, he looks perfect for his brief cameo and while looking extremely stern he is also comic in his inhuman rigidity and self-regard.

IMDB identifies the actor as the well-known and prolific character actor A. Bromley Davenport, and supplies this image from the pawnshop scene. (13) The crowd of very noisy women is then admitted to the pawnshop and witness a spectacle which has a comic aspect while also making a serious point about the experiences of Hanky Park folk. As Mr Price tips out his petty cash from two small cloth bank bags into a dish, complete and awed silence instantly replaces the hubbub. Though this is only petty cash (which Price puts unconcernedly beneath his counter), and maybe amount to five pounds, to this crowd of Hanky Park women it is a fortune, and their silence is a kind of religious awe at witnessing something holding such mystery for them. It is of course this for which they have come to Price’s pawnshop – and he is the one who holds all power over it. As soon as the dish is below the counter the noise breaks out again, with the women competing to be served first. Most topics for comedy in the play recur in the film – including all the business about Mrs Nattle selling ‘nips’ of whisky. However a few comic motifs not in the novel but added to the play do not make it into the film. The shorts are not there at all either in the dialogue or on screen – Sally goes hiking in a neat below-knee-length skirt instead (25.10 minutes).

Though John Baxter did not want to cast an existing star as Sally, that is not to say that he did not want her to look something of a star during the film – perhaps he felt (unlike some theatre reviewers) that the shorts might be less glamorous than a skirt? Equally, the play’s comic conversation between Sally and Helen about the cost of marriage licences and dog licences does not survive into the film – perhaps because the sequence of events is different, and by the time Harry and Helen have to get married, Sally is in too grim a state for any humorous reflections on marriage.

These examples are I think characteristic of the comic patterns which the film develops. It sustains the comic-tragic aesthetic which Gow and Greenwood agreed on for the play, and there is here too a regular alternation between more serious and more humorous scenes, though every comic scene also makes a serious observation consistent with the social critiques of the whole film. One of the striking features of the film of Love on the Dole was that it broke away from a long-established British film tradition which saw working-people in a predominantly comic perspective (where they were not villainous). This is certainly the case for most of its portrayal of Mr and Mrs Hardcastle, Sally and Larry and Harry and Helen. However, the ‘Chorus’ in the film seem to me still to evoke that comic and class-based tradition (itself perhaps derived from music hall), so that there is a familiarity for audiences when any of the Chorus begin a scene and generally at that point an expectation of comic relief is set up (for example, as Mrs Dorbell and Mrs Nattle enter the latter’s house after their business at the pawnshop, there is clearly a comic music motif in the soundtrack preparing the audience for a comic scene (between 11.53 and 12.15 minutes into the film): https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxOT-ya6BNNntSAQuDj13Ch37zA2gnNmB9?si=znJ6DiGRk5nGDleL.

The scene itself also has examples of that characteristic joke associated with the depiction of working people – the malapropism and related devices about imperfect command of language. Talking about how everything is going downhill, Mrs Dorbell says ‘if my mother were alive today to see the goings on in the world, she’d turn in her grave she would’ (14.12 minutes). There is another example after Larry has died, when the Chorus discuss the news that he is not going to be buried: ‘He’s to be burnt up, created or some such word’ (1.18.31 minutes). These are funny moments, but are devices underpinned by a set of class attitudes and expectations about education and intelligence. The séance scene, as in the play, is also rich in comedy, but makes sharp observations about the place of these small entrepreneurs in Hanky Park and their attitudes towards money and their own self-advancement. Some reviews of the film emphasised its seriousness and contemporary relevance even in wartime, but many also noted the combination of comic as well as serious modes. Here is the Banbury Advertiser (p)review, given in full to show its sense of how the film worked well as a whole:

Next Monday the main attraction is Walter Greenwood’s famous novel and play, Love the Dole. This has been made into an excellent film, with cast headed by Deborah Kerr and Clifford Evans. It is a British film of outstanding merit. The struggles of the working-classes are depicted with unsparing realism, lightened by youthful romance and comedy sequences. Deborah Kerr is charming in the lead and gives a sincere and thoroughly convincing portrayal. Clifford Evans is excellent as the young agitator. Geoffrey Hibbert, a youthful player, gives a remarkably clever performance as the heroine’s brother. George Carney and Mary Merrall are very good as the parents; ripe comedy cameos are contributed by Marie O’Neill, Mary Ault and Marjorie Rhodes. Love the Dole is a really fine picture that will be enjoyed by all classes. The accompanying picture is Pathetone Parade of 1941, which is a bright variety show (24 September 1941, p.6).

This sees the film as a well-balanced mixture of ‘unsparing realism’, ‘youthful romance’, comedy sequences’ and ‘comedy cameos’, echoing some of Greenwood’s own earliest comments on his novel (see Walter Greenwood’s First Press Interview: ‘Turned Idle Days to Money’ (Manchester Evening News, 1933)), as well as Greenwood and Gow’s intentions for the play (see above). I note also the observation that ‘all classes’ will enjoy the film, suggesting not only a harmonious combination of genres, but perhaps also a ‘balanced’ expression of social attitudes (and social criticism?), suggesting the film will not make viewers uncomfortable (a key and controversial issue in subsequent critical discussion of Love on the Dole in each of its forms). Finally, the preview tells us of the film in the accompanying programme. Of course, audiences then expected a programme rather than a single feature film, but managers had some choice about how they constructed programmes to suit their understanding of the particular audience at their cinema. I wonder if the accompanying film (shown last, I assume) was intended to send audiences home in a simpler cheerful mood than might have been evoked by Love on the Dole, despite its skilful structure and combination of genre? Certainly this Pathetone film record of current variety stars seems simpler fare – however, even so the comic monologue by (as it happens!) ‘Aunty Doleful’ (Norman Evans), if unsophisticated, is not completely unrelated to some of the comic grimness of Greenwood’s ‘chorus’ (see the film on Youtube, posted by British Pathé: https://youtu.be/G4Gov9yL1jM?si=gRU-3WfTLrgLGDKZ reel 1, 10 minutes 12 seconds).

The film, of course, ends with a moment of highly serious prophecy which gave audiences a serious and more-or-less optimistic thought to take home as well as anchoring the film as a commentary on the differences between the thirties and forties and on post-war hopes. Mrs Hardcastle expresses her hope that mass unemployment cannot just go on – soon she hopes everyone will be needed. Her prophecy has by 1941 come true, but will naturally strike audiences as bitter-sweet given that only rearmament and then total war have led to full-employment, and indeed ‘manpower shortages’, so that as well as men British women are being extensively mobilised in one way or another. Her speech is echoed by the famous rolling closing caption which indeed mobilises the film of Love on the Dole as part of ‘the People’s War’ narrative in which the war is being fought not just to defeat fascism, but also to bring to Britain a much more equal society. The caption is signed (and I take it written) by A.V. Alexander, the First Lord of the Admiralty and a Co-operative Society MP:

The film thus ends on an appropriately mixed note of regret for the negligence of the thirties, a sad acceptance of the present and that in employment terms war is an ‘improvement’ on peace, and hope that the post-war will this time achieve permanent social progress. What is understandably not there is any of the comedy which has nevertheless and variously contributed so much throughout the overall film experience.

5. Some Conclusions on Doleful Humour

I came across (purportedly) comic material while originally searching for material on Love on the Dole itself, and gradually realised that it was quite extensive, that it was also completely forgotten, and also that while the comic in Love on the Dole was sometimes acknowledged, it had never been discussed in any detail or depth. I was puzzled at the frequency of comic dole pieces, because it did not seen an obviously humorous topic, but then the phenomenon seemed something which begged exploration. My expectation was that perhaps such comic pieces would indeed not take the dole or unemployment seriously – and that is true in some instances or parts of some examples. However, some of the comic dole texts examined are actually more inclined to mock he bureaucracy of the dole office and the benefits system of the time. Indeed, one of the striking differences between Love on the Dole‘s use of humour and that of Thomas F. Convery, John Blakeley and Donald McGill is that while they have an at least initial focus on the unsuspected humorous possibilities of the Labour Exchange itself, that is never a focus for comedy for Greenwood/Gow/Baxter. On the contrary, in all versions of Love on the Dole, scenes in the Labour Exchange are always in the tragic domain, with desperate disbelief on the part of characters when their dole is cut completely by the operations of the Means Test, as in this scene (though one notes that it shares features with the other representations of the Labour Exchange – the impersonal clerk, the counter and grille, the policeman in close attendance: https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxBXvHWTEfk3KO9rbcMJT-qGFnVDM9Pek3?si=bnmE-97d8dWvkdr5 .

Love on the Dole, and especially the play, quickly became such a success that its representation of unemployment became dominant. However, when it first came onto the scene some thought it was another (mainly) comic work, suggesting just how lodged in people’s minds were texts which did in one way or another find things to laugh at in the dole. Here is a London theatre critic, A.T. Borthwick, on this initial impression and its being set to rights:

When I first heard the title of Love on the Dole I dismissed it as another of those cheap and formless affairs designed to amuse the unsophisticated. Then the Rusholme Repertory Theatre, presenting it in Manchester, disclosed it as an intensely moving play, dealing with things that matter. I have not seen the play myself, but ever since I heard about the impression it made I have been waiting news that a London manager was giving it a chance. That hasn’t happened yet, but Love on the Dole is to open a tour at Stoke on May 7. It is by Walter Greenwood, a young collector of payments for clothing, who, I believe, is still pursuing that unromantic avocation, and Ronald Gow, the Altrincham schoolmaster who wrote Gallows Glorious. (London Daily News, 4 April 1934, p.6).

He came back to the same point in a further review of Love on the Dole when it was just about to transfer to the Garrick in London. Borthwick was completely persuaded that it was a powerful play ‘though the title seems to suggest a cheap music-hall show’ (London Daily News, 16 January 1935, p. 4). There is an assumption here that comic revues about the dole were inevitably ‘formless’, something which those we have looked at, and indeed the film version Off the Dole, do tend to confirm (though I acknowledge that a different kind of entertainment aesthetic may be what they are aiming for). Equally, a cinema-goer seems to have confused Formby’s Off the Dole and Love on the Dole in an enquiry he made to the Nottingham Evening Post in 1935. The paper had a section called ‘The Editor’s Letter Bag’ which published some whole letters and also provided concise responses in ‘Answers to Correspondents’. ‘Jack’ clearly wanted to see a film of Love on the Dole (even if the BBFC did not want him to) and asked for some information, leading to this response from the Editor:

Jack – No film entitled Love on the Dole has been screened in Nottingham. Possibly you are thinking of On the Dole, which with George Formby in the chief part, was recently trade shown here (20 April 1935, p.8).

Sadly, the Editor has also confused the title of Formby’s film slightly, but these two examples at least suggest that the dole comic revue was quite a well-recognised genre before being displaced/replaced by Greenwood and Gow’s better-shaped work.

However, even then there were clearly a number of parodies of Love on the Dole to keep in circulation more purely (?) ‘comic’ perspectives on the dole. In 1935, the ‘Hastings Corporation Electricity Department Social’ features (as part of a ‘minstrel show – oh dear) a ‘sketch called Love for the Dole‘ (Hastings and St. Leonards Observer, 20 April, 1935, p. 14). In 1936, the Driffield Times (East Yorkshire) advertised Bunny Doyle’s ‘uproarious musical comedy burlesque’ Love Up the Dole at the New Alexandra Theatre (7 November, p.5). Bunny Doyle (1895-1955) was a well known comic singer and performer from the nineteen-twenties until the nineteen-fifties (see his minimal biography at IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0236301/bio/?ref_=nm_ov_bio_sm). In 1937 the South Shields Gazette advertised a show at the South Shields Pavilion thus:

Ernie Lotinga in

Love Up the Pole

A Breezy Comedy as Good as Love on the Dole (20 April, p.3)

In fact, the same paper advertises also a simultaneous film version of this on the same page (at the Harton Nook Palladium – ‘side-splitting mirth – the season’s comedy hit’ – directed by Clifford Gulliver, produced by Butcher’s Film services, 1936). Ernst Lotinga (1875-1951) was a very successful variety comedian of both stage and film, best known for his comic simpleton character Jimmy Josser, though his shows were often regarded as vulgar and even verging on the obscene (see his Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernie_Lotinga). Indeed, the film of Love Up the Pole included some scenes with the actress Phyllis Dixey, known as ‘the Queen of Striptease’! (see her Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phyllis_Dixey). This seems extraordinary, and I am sure Greenwood would not have approved; nevertheless the advert for the stage show implies (I suspect quite inaccurately) that it is a similar kind of comedy to Love on the Dole. OED gives sense 2b of ‘breezy’ as having a figurative meaning: ‘fresh, airy; characterised by brisk vigour or activity; lively, jovial’. This does not seem that readily applicable to Love on the Dole, which is engaging in many ways, and comic in various ways, but is also clearly focused on despair, exhaustion and poverty. There are no readily viewable versions of Love Up the Pole, but I will see what the BFI can do to help with this – in the meantime the mind boggles at how exactly Lotinga could have produced a (partly?) risqué parody of Greenwood and Gow’s unemployment play.

Gow and Greenwood’s humour in the three versions of Love on the Dole was generally deployed very differently from that in other humorous ‘dole texts’. While those I have been able to look at in detail do not always look down on those on the dole, and indeed as in the case of several Donald McGill texts sometimes add an odd dignity to those signing-on, others look as if they might draw on stereotypes of the unemployed as ‘idle’ and deliberate avoiders of work (for example, the 1936 film Dodging the Dole). Greenwood and Gow on the contrary clearly and powerfully counter stereotypes about the unemployed. This is one of the factors behind the representation of the Hardcastle family as evidently ‘respectable’. Mrs Hardcastle works tirelessly in the domestic sphere to keep her husband and two children going, while they all have jobs and make their contribution to the household economy. This functional family comes under increasing pressure as the story and history unfold: first Harry’s apprenticeship doers not lead to an engineer’s job on an adult male wage, then Mr Hardcastle’s pit job goes from full-time to a three-day week to closure, while Sally retains her job at the cotton mill, but is often on short time. The play makes clear that the Hardcastles have not made the ‘bad choices’ which allowed some of the better-off to blame unemployment on ‘idleness’ and addiction to gambling and drink. On the contrary, they have had no choices, and when Sally makes her sacrifice to save her family that may be conventionally ‘immoral’, it is a selfless and not a selfish ‘choice’.

Nevertheless, I think there is a strand of a shared popular culture which does run through the comic and tragi-comic dole texts. As Jeffrey Richards notes and explores there are clear kinships between elements of music-hall humour and that of Donald McGill’s postcards and George Formby’s songs:

[His] songs were the musical equivalent of the seaside comic postcard . . . the importance of the songs, as of the postcards, is that they dealt very largely with sex . . . [however] George’s songs were really no more subversive than the picture postcards they dramatised (The Age of the Dream Palace: Cinema and Society 1930-1939, Routledge & Kegan Paul,1984, pp.193-5).

On the whole, Greenwood and Gow’s humour is less focussed on sex (Mrs Bull’s pawn-shop observation that ‘Satan finds work for idle hands’ is an exception), though it is used to say things about the consequences of sex which would have been very difficult to get past various kinds of censorship in serious formats (and of course, Greenwood could not for a period of six years get the overall serious film proposal past the British Board of Film Censors – and only very odd wartime circumstances and the authority of the Ministry of Information more-or-less overcame its objections). However, comedy is is used to comment on other topics also dealt with in music-hall humour and by Formby and McGill – principally naive young lovers, husbands and wives after marriage, unplanned pregnancy, drinking, and outspoken and unconventional older women. Tropes such Mrs Dorbell’s obsessive need for a nip to medicine her cough, Sally’s shorts, the logic behind marriage licences and dog licences, malapropisms such as ‘creation’ for ‘cremation’ and ‘antiskeptic’ for ‘skeptic’ (in the séance scene, Cape edition of play, p.46), and in general the self-interest of the ‘chorus’, would not look completely out of place in music-hall monologues, a George Formby song or a Donald McGill postcard. In Love on the Dole (in all versions) however, the comedy is not incidental but is part of a lively, sustained and coherent social critique. Perhaps in both its serious and more comic modes Love on the Dole is original not so much in inventing new kinds of expression but in deploying existing tools familiar to its audiences towards new and challenging ends. It was after all a tragi-comedy which pleased and moved varied audiences over at least a decade while not bringing into play their potential stereotyping of the unemployed and did much to shift them towards a view that British class structures and the responsibilties of the state must and could change.

NOTES

Note 1. Attributed to Richard Dacre, Reference Guide to British and Irish Directors (see: http://www.screenonline.org.uk/people/id/506704/index.html). In fact, I have so far located neither a hard copy nor online publication with this title and author, so cannot supply a publication date nor pagination. I will keep looking; nevertheless, the commentary on John Blakeley seems valuable and authoritative.

Note 2. Reported in Stephen Constantine’s Unemployment in Britain Between the Wars, p. 27; the endnote givres the source as R.N. Titmus, Poverty and Population, Macmillan and London, 1938, but gives no page reference.

Note 3. Here is the reverse of the 1905 Factory Act card. The message is somewhat cryptic in parts (including the address at the top, and the sign-off at the bottom) , but I think this transcription is correct, and does perhaps hint at a secret relationship:

Abode of Love

Booth

Returning Wed. evening.

Hope you had a good time.

King regards always

Yours to ashes

Kit

Note 4. The Wellcome Collection hosts the whole text of the 1901 Act (https://wellcomecollection.org/works/yc8xckz4/items), which may be more than you need, but the Wikipedia section on the Act under its overview of the Factory Acts does seem rather minimal (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factory_Acts). The legislation did not concern solely the employment of children.

Note 5. Here is a scan of the message on the reverse of the card. It is perfectly legible and reads: ‘Dear Hattie & Fred, Having lovely time & glorious weather. Went to Flamborough yesterday. Betty would like Kathleen’s address as she left it at home. The kiddies all wish to be remembered to you. Best love from Arthur & Flo’.

Note 6. In the most recent study of McGill’s work, Donald McGill: Postcard Artist, Greaves & Thomas, Ryde, Isle of Wight, 2014. pp.1. and 111. It is the most scholarly and comprehensive study of McGill.

Note 7. See Maternity Allowance Background Gov.Uk download @ https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/222912/MaternityAllowance.pdf#:~:text=MA%20originated%20as%20a%20contributory%20benefit%20introduced%20in,weeks%20but%20increased%20to%2018%20weeks%20in%201953.

Note 8. Orwell’s contemporary Arthur Calder Marshall (1908-1992), an interesting novelist in the thirties, published a book on Donald McGill long after Orwell’s death: Wish You were Here – the Art of Donald McGill, Selected & Appraised by Arthur Calder Marshall (Hutchinson, London 1966). Though the title and some details respond to Orwell’s essay and in various ways question its persuasiveness I do not think the book really adds to nor refutes Orwell’s analysis, nor gives any real grounds for modifying it, while also not making the kind of contribution of biographical and publishing history knowledge achieved by Buckland and Crossley.

Note 9. I feel somewhat nostalgic at this point: my undergraduate final-year dissertation was titled: ‘Is Comedy Always Conservative?’ (University of York, 1983 – this may not have been the full title: there might well have been reference too to the theorists of comedy and humour Freud and Henri Bergson). I thought comedy did not always reinforce the status quo, and still do.

Note 10. A set of descriptions I first used in my book Walter Greenwood’s Love on the Dole – Novel, Play, Film (Liverpool University Press, 2018), p. 82.

Note 11. See Walter Greenwood’s Love on the Dole – Novel, Play, Film (Liverpool University Press, 2018), p. 72-6 for discussion of the novel’s treatment of birth control, and the response of the British Board of Film Censor’s Miss Shortt to the material in the Cape play-text.

Note 12. The article is not open access, but the abstract gives a good sense of the article – see ‘“What life means for those at the bottom”: Love on the Dole and its reception since the 1930s’, Literature & History, 3rd series, Vol. 20. Abstract .

Note 13. See IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0033853/fullcredits/?ref_=tt_cl_sm and his Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._Bromley_Davenport .