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Title: When I Remember...
Author: John Robert Clynes (1869-1949)
Date of first publication: 1940
Place and date of edition used as base for this ebook:
   London: Macmillan, 1940 (First Edition)
   [Macmillan War Pamphlets 6]
Date first posted: 28 February 2008
Date last updated: 28 February 2008
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #90




    WHEN I REMEMBER...

    _By_

    THE RT. HON. J. R. CLYNES, M.P.


    LONDON
    MACMILLAN & CO. LTD
    1940




WHEN I REMEMBER...


When I look back, as through a telescope, down the vista of
the years since I was a small boy running barefoot over
dangerous oily floors, keeping pace with spinning machinery
in an Oldham cotton mill, I realise with a shock that, since
that time, England has been changed as though at the sweep
of a wizard's wand.

But there was no wizard, just as there has been no Dictator.
The almost incredible industrial reforms have been brought
about instead largely by the courage, patience and sincerity
of a band of self-educated visionaries in red ties and baggy
trousers. I remember that particularly when I read Hitler's
claims and promises and abuse. He has presented himself to
the workers as the real Socialist who gets things done, and
he never ceases to pour scorn on the old Social-Democratic
Party, on what he calls "goody-goody meetings, where people
talk about the brotherhood of the people". He has had the
help of rubber truncheons, incendiarism and murder, and he
has succeeded in sweeping away the whole trade union system,
the whole machinery of collective bargaining. Trade union
leaders have been shot or driven into exile; the workers'
funds, their newspapers and printing presses have been
confiscated; the Co-operative movement has been wiped out.
Long hours, low wages and unlimited deductions from wages,
Gestapo agents in every factory, workers moved here or there
at the will of the dictator, this even in peacetime was the
result of Hitler's revolution.

We have had a revolution, too, and I think it is time we
spoke of it aloud for Dictators to hear. I have lived
through it and been a part of it. When I was born in 1869
only a few visionaries talked of working men being admitted
to Parliament. I have lived to see a foundry hand become
Foreign Secretary, the son of a Keighley weaver created
Chancellor of the Exchequer, and a miner Secretary for War.

The strange world into which I was born was dark and lurid;
in the background stood the stately homes of England in all
their peace and beauty; in the foreground were belching
factories, slag-surrounded mines and grim mills, in which
millions of bent-backed, ant-like figures ran to and fro,
dutifully making the money by which the stately homes were
financed, earning for themselves only coarse bread and the
uncertain right to exist in squalor. In an inconspicuous
corner where Oldham stands, amidst a great fever of mill
work, surrounded by poverty and disease, malnutrition and
ignorance, a small boy, sullenly eager to escape from the
brutal slavery of school to the merciless thraldom of the
mill, was very anxious to quiet the rumblings of an empty
belly by contributing to the home exchequer the few
shillings a week that a "little piecer" could earn. Myself!


=A Little Piecer=

I was a small, spindly, white-faced boy, and I had none of
childhood's dreams. When I thought of anything beyond
hunger, fatigue and the winter cold that pricked the very
bones of my fingers and toes, my mind revolved with ambition
around my next step in life. When I achieved the manly age
of ten I could--if I were lucky--obtain half-time employment
in one of the great cotton mills, whose chimneys darkened
the sky.

At last my tenth birthday came, and I managed to obtain
half-time work at the Dowry Mill as a "little piecer". My
hours were from six in the morning each day to noon; then a
brief time off for dinner; then on to school for the
afternoons; I was to receive half-a-crown a week in return.
As conditions were then I was counted lucky. But by that
time my brother and sisters were becoming a serious drain on
our combined resources. My father and I earned less than
thirty shillings a week between us; and our total wages were
not very much on which to pay rent, buy clothes and feed the
family. Our food was bread, with butter when we could afford
it, and lard or dripping when we could not; stews composed
of vegetables and unwanted cuts of meat; peas and beans
which filled us well and did not cost very much; and tea
when we were lucky. Nothing else.

I worked at the spinning-frames, in my bare feet, since
leather on those oil-soaked floors would have been
treacherous. Often I fell, rolling instinctively and in
terror from beneath the gliding jennies, well aware that
horrible mutilation or death would result if the advancing
monsters overtook and gripped me. Sometimes splinters as
keen as daggers drove through my naked feet, leaving aching
wounds. Running in and out, straining my eyes in the gas-lit
gloom to watch for broken threads, my ten-year-old legs soon
felt like lead and my head spun faster than the machinery.
As my aching fingers pieced up the broken ends of cotton I
thought how lucky I was to have been born in a humane era
when children could not be employed for more than ten
working hours a day, and how much more dreadful must have
been the conditions of child labour when my father was a
boy. Heaven knows I was right!

At last the age of twelve came! I was free from the thraldom
of school, where I had learnt nothing except a fear of
birching and a hatred of formal education, and I was able to
go forth a grown man into the world of work, able to earn
ten shillings a week now, a full-time piecer. How often I
had envied other lads a year or two older than
myself--sunken-eyed waifs--who had already graduated into
brave industry. At least they had finished with school; at
least they were being paid real money each Saturday, and
their parents left them a penny or two of it each week with
which they could buy things really for themselves.

That was my childhood, and my prospects? I could dream
daringly of surpassing my father's income some day, if I
kept earnestly at my job, my father who earned twenty-four
shillings a week as a labourer for the Oldham Corporation.
And my scanty leisure--I remember no golden summers, no
triumphs at games and sports, no bird-nesting, no tramps
through dark woods or over shadow-racing hills. There was no
wireless: no bicycles: newspapers only existed for educated
people: there were no cheap books. I remember accumulating
two weeks' pocket money to spend sixpence on a dog-eared
dictionary and working through it in the evening after work
from A to Zymotic. Candles cost me threepence or more each
week. The dictionary was followed by an eightpenny copy of
Cobbett's Grammar--but at that point I felt the need of some
guide. An ex-schoolmaster held classes two nights a week,
and when the fivepence I could contribute from the wages at
the mill proved insufficient, I began to earn another
threepence by reading the weekly newspaper to three blind
old men in a stuffy, dusty Oldham cottage. Such, and the
classes, was my secondary education.


=And Now To-day=

Now I want to take my eyes away from that "little piecer"
and consider how to-day Britain brings up her children. She
has a system which makes it possible to look after them
before they are born and to continue looking after them
until they are launched on the adventurous seas of active
working-life, physically and mentally equipped to win
happiness for themselves and carve out a useful citizenship
for the State.

This is not easily secured, nor is it done without exception
all over the country to the full extent. But it can be done
and it is done. The opportunities are there. The powers are
there. The key to their full use lies with the local
authorities. The driving force behind those local
authorities rests with the people themselves.

That is a point of extreme importance. The system of
education and child welfare has probably no superior in the
world. True, its administration to a large extent is
permissive and not compulsory on the local authorities
(apart from the basic education organisation itself) but the
complete use of the whole system depends on the fathers and
mothers of the children and on the influence they bring to
bear in local administration. In that sense it is a wholly
democratic and not a dictated affair.


=Maternity Welfare=

Let me sketch in broad outline what can and what does in
many parts of the country happen to the British child. First
there are ante-natal clinics. Wide powers are given to local
authorities under the maternity and child welfare
legislation for the supervising of nursing and expectant
mothers and for looking after the welfare of children up to
the age of five.

Admittedly there are not as many ante-natal clinics as there
should be, but a wonderful work is done in those that have
been established. We have realised in this country to what
an extent a child's future may be determined before it is
born, how much of the physical and mental quality of our
coming citizens depends on how we deal with the expectant
mother. So the expectant mother is able to go to the
ante-natal clinic for advice and medical attention, and how
much this has meant has been shown not only by statistics
but in an easily observable increase in health and
happiness.

Take infant mortality, i.e., deaths of children under one
year per thousand births. Just before the Great War the rate
for England and Wales was 108 per thousand. The last
available official figures showed a reduction to 58 per
thousand. It is still unfortunately true that, while this
remarkable decline has taken place all over the country,
there is an illuminating difference between the rates in
poor and overcrowded districts and those in more prosperous
and widely-spaced neighbourhoods.

But this is not always the case, and the exceptions show how
much can be done where the least might be expected. Take
Bermondsey, a London Borough where the people are mostly
very poor and where there are many unemployed or casually
employed. Within twelve years, Labour rule there nearly
halved the infant death rate, and I remember Mary
Sutherland, the Chief Woman Officer of the Labour Party,
writing: "It is safer to be born in poverty-stricken
Bermondsey to-day than in many well-to-do areas, thanks to
the bold housing policy of the Council, and to the
whole-hearted way in which the Maternity and Child Welfare
Act has been carried out."

The attack has been made. We have shown the way. And the
results are a great justification.

At the ante-natal clinics the expectant mother can be
provided with free milk.[l] If, after all this precautionary
care, she takes the wise advice given there, the expectant
mother will have her baby in a maternity hospital, where she
and the infant will receive treatment equal to that
purchased by the highest fees of those more fortunately
placed. There is still a shortage of such hospital
accommodation in a number of areas, but before the outbreak
of war continual progress was being made, and that must and
will be extended in happier days. Side by side with this,
there is a system of home service, and last year more than
3,000 women health visitors in England alone paid between
them nearly 8,000,000 visits.

[Footnote 1: Now under the Government's milk scheme all
expectant and nursing mothers and children under 5 can
obtain milk either free or at half price.]

So the baby is born, and the mother, tended and nourished,
can continue to go to a clinic or a child welfare centre
still obtaining advice, medical attention, milk, and in many
cases, food.


=The Nursery School=

At the age of two there comes a change for the baby. In the
enlightened areas there is a Nursery School--a bright, airy,
well-designed place, run by specially qualified and
understanding women. In other districts there are nursery
classes in the elementary schools. Gently the toddlers are
led along, "picking up", rather than being "taught",
invaluable things like personal hygiene and the budding
ideas of service and friendly help. Quickly they begin to
take a pride in their individual washing materials (labelled
with a picture of a bird, a flower or an animal), in their
own toothbrushes (and in the necessity for using them), in
helping to serve meals and to "clear up" as soon as they are
able to do so.

They eat their hot dinner, go to rest in their cribs, get
the first glimmerings of "education" and then they are taken
home--there to teach their fathers and mothers and older
sisters or brothers what they have learned. There are
thousands of small households to which these little children
have brought instruction. Regard the young child, if you
like, as the human counterpart of the pebble tossed into the
pool. The circle of the ripples widens and widens. So it is
with the spreading communal and comradely influence of these
Nursery School children.

In the best Nursery Schools the children have three meals a
day. In some of them, children who come in with rickets are
cured within eighteen months.

Here is another and a very vital problem--that of nutrition.
It is not much good trying to teach an ill-nourished child.
The maternity and child welfare legislation gives power to
local authorities to provide food free or at cheap rates to
necessitous mothers and young children. That this power is
not used nearly to the extent that it should be is not the
fault of our system, but is due to many local authorities
lagging behind. I said in a recent article that by peaceful
means we have secured reforms in working-class life beyond
the dreams of our fathers. I added: "Much yet remains to be
done and by means of a wholesome discontent more will be
obtained."

A wholesome discontent. I would like to emphasise that. An
orderly expressed discontent under our democratic method can
reap the complete harvest. That is where the complete
cutaway from dictatorship methods comes. What we have won,
what we are going to win, are things not tossed to the
people by Dictators but things gained and cherished by the
people because justice accompanies freedom.

Ante-natal treatment, child welfare centres, home service,
the provision of food and milk, nursery schools, Maternity
Hospitals--all these things are helping towards healthy
babies and happy mothers, but there is room for advancement,
and the Standing Joint Committee of Industrial Women's
Organisations--which is the Labour Party's Advisory
Committee on women's questions--pointed the way to a
tremendously necessary national benefit when in a Labour
Party pamphlet entitled _Children's Charter_ it said: "It
is, of course, important that the welfare centres should be
used as fully and freely as possible by poor mothers, but it
is equally important to emphasise that they provide a
service which _all_ children need and which can better be
met collectively than by parents individually."


=A Chance to Learn=

Britain has now got the baby not only born but also, where
there is a nursery school, or nursery classes (the country
should be speckled by them), brought to the age of
five--healthy, happy and with at all events some basis on
which real education can be founded.

The primary school and the subsequent stages follow and
every boy and girl is assured of full education for the nine
years following the nursery school age of five. Those who by
their natural gifts are able to take advantage of added
opportunities can go farther. Free places with maintenance
grants in secondary schools are increasing in number and
should still further increase. For those who can fight
through there are university opportunities.

In that remarkable book, _The Silent Social Revolution_,[2}
the author shows how a people "with a very practical genius"
has built up in a matter of forty years a public educational
system "which, if progress continues at the same pace in the
years to come, should soon be able to challenge comparison
with that of any other country in the world."

[Footnote 2: G.A.N. Lowndes (Oxford University Press).]

He says: "A visitor to one of our elementary schools to-day
will observe the economy and efficiency of its discipline,
will note its atmosphere of orderliness and precision, and
will carry away an indelible impression of the good manners
and politeness with which all schools now seek to welcome
their guests. Lest he should take these things for granted,
it is as well that he should be reminded before he leaves
that it is barely fifty years ago that the attendance
officer who wished to penetrate one of those slums from
which some of the children may still come had to take a
police officer with him. It is well, too, that he should be
reminded that the streets of London were swarming with waifs
and strays who had never attended school, and who slept
together in gangs in such places as the Adelphi Arches, on
barges, on the steps of London Bridge, in empty boxes on
barges--covered with tarpaulins or old sacks."


=A Worthy Beginning=

I would like to quote again from this valuable and revealing
book a passage which seems to me singularly appropriate at
the moment: "Nothing is more exasperating to those to whom
social reform is religion in action than the readiness with
which the English neglect, forget or minimise their
achievements. The visitor from Central Europe will tell with
enthusiasm of the decline of illiteracy in his country since
the war. The Englishman scarcely knows the meaning of the
word, still less does he trouble to enquire whether
illiteracy still exists in England.

"It is in fact probably true to say that surprisingly few
Englishmen, even among those who are engaged in the service
of education, would feel equipped to give at short notice a
reasoned and convincing statement of the case for public
education. Again, although most people will readily assent
to the dictum that educational expenditure is long-range
expenditure, few are qualified to prove its truth by showing
what the long-range expenditure incurred by past generations
has achieved."

His conclusion is as follows: "In the creation of an
educated democracy complacent satisfaction with the degree
of progress so far achieved can find no place. The
millennium is still a long way off. So long as there is one
child who has failed to obtain the precise educational
treatment his individuality requires; so long as a single
child goes hungry, has nowhere to play, fails to receive the
medical attention he needs; so long as the nation fails to
train and provide scope for every atom of outstanding
ability it can find; so long as there are administrators or
teachers who feel no sense of mission, who cannot administer
or who cannot teach, the system will remain incomplete.

"_But_ (the italics are mine) _when the social historian of
the future comes to write of the development of public
education in England in the first sixty years of its
existence as a compulsory force, he may feel that,
considering how much had to be accomplished, the task was
worthily begun_."

Those words I think we can all take to heart. They are words
which Dictators and their servants and sycophants can also
take to heart.

The bare date outline of our education enactments during the
last sixty-odd years is as follows: 1833, the first
Government grant for education, which amounted to 20,000
for school buildings; 1880, compulsory education for
children from five to eleven years; 1891, free education in
all elementary schools and the age extended to twelve; 1906,
the School Meals Act which gave permission to local
authorities to feed necessitous children on attendance days;
1914, another School Meals Act which extended the scope of
feeding to week-ends and holidays; 1918, an Education Act
which gave power to set up Nursery Schools and Open-Air
Schools; 1921, another Act relating to the same matters and
giving local authorities further powers and the opportunity
of receiving State grants for the purposes of these two
types of school.

The last report of the Board of Education showed that local
educational authorities in England and Wales spent about
96 million pounds in 1937-8 which included 16 3_s_. 2_d_. per
child for elementary education alone. It told how steady
progress was being made with reorganisation of the
elementary school system on the lines of the Hadow Report on
the education of the adolescent. It told, too, how
practically all authorities now make more or less complete
provision in the medical services for treatment of defects
covered by the regulations. The treatment of minor ailments,
it was stated, dental treatment, and treatment for defective
vision are undertaken by nearly all local education
authorities, while orthopdic treatment covers nearly ninety
per cent. of the public elementary school population. All
authorities provide clinics.

This is no occasion to discuss such matters as secondary and
still further advanced education, commercial and technical
training schemes and the like.

Our educational development has reached a high mark,
although there is admittedly much to be done. There is still
more to be done in the matters of free feeding and general
nutrition. Tremendous strides have been made in curative
work. We need faster and greater strides in preventive work.
Much has been done there during the last quarter of a
century, but much remains.


=The Rights of Children=

The fundamental thing is that in this country the rights of
the children have been recognised.

I will go back for a moment to _The Silent Social
Revolution_. The author says: "Every pass-degree student of
history knows that the Duke of Wellington exclaimed that the
battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton;
every honours student knows that he never said anything of
the kind. He did, however, admit that it was 'a damn near
thing'. Similarly the Great War may not have been won in the
little asphalt yards of our public elementary schools, or
even in the more spacious playgrounds of our local grammar
and secondary schools, but it would have been a far nearer
thing than Waterloo had not those schools been sending out
year by year after 1902 hundreds of thousands of scholars a
little better trained, a little more accustomed to
leadership, than their prototypes of twenty years before."

In the future someone may point the same lesson in relation
to the events through which we are passing to-day.

There are, of course, many other aspects of the successful
fight that has been waged on behalf of the children. In my
own childhood even toddlers could be employed and I was a
child myself when a Workshop Act was passed prohibiting the
employment of children under eight years but permitting
half-time work for children of from eight to thirteen years.

In my manhood years street trading for all children was
forbidden by law, and I was "getting on" when, in 1920, work
for all children under fourteen was ruled out.

Much the same sort of progress has taken place in connection
with juvenile delinquency. Enormous strides, including the
probation system, have been made. More and more Labour men
and women have got on the magisterial benches and on to
committees concerned with the tribunals and institutions
dealing with children.

The present approved schools and remand homes may not be
ideal, but they do give delinquent children a greater chance
than ever they had before and further progress is still
being fought for and achieved.

Then there are such things as the Playing Fields Movement
together with the efforts made by enlightened local
authorities to provide playing fields for children instead
of leaving them to scamper in the streets; there are the
cleared slums and the open spaces which have taken their
place--all making for the health and the fitness of a young
generation who will know how to use the peace that will
follow vanquished dictatorship. Their fathers are fighting
for that peace. They themselves will be spiritually,
mentally and physically prepared to safeguard it.

All this is what Britain has done, and is doing, for its
women and children with the object of building up a healthy
people fit to play their proper part in the work of the
nation.


=Those Bad Days=

And now what does our country do for its citizens when they
are grown-up and go out in the world? It is impossible to
answer that question without feeling a glow of pride in our
achievements. Looking back again on the changes I have seen
in my own lifetime, I am amazed at the tremendous strides
that have been made in providing greater comfort, happiness
and security for the men and women of Britain. I am not
complacent; I am not satisfied. There are many reforms yet
to be made; much progress still to be registered, but it
would be ungenerous and unreal not to recognise all that has
been done.

When I was born, the social and economic conditions in this
country were appalling. There was no Health Insurance; no
Unemployment Insurance; no Workmen's Compensation. An
accident at work would send the breadwinner home to bed and
there would be no help for his family in its hour of need,
except the wicked old Poor Law System, the Bumbledoms so
graphically described by Charles Dickens. My own father in
his late working life was disabled by an accident. But there
was then no compensation. For a few weeks he received
charity gifts from the employer. The experience made me an
ardent advocate of compensation, and my first speech in the
House of Commons thirty-four years ago was on this subject.

In those bad days prolonged sickness or unemployment meant
that the family had to sell its household goods, to live in
bare rooms, in hunger and in rags, and even to send little
children out to work at seven or eight years of age to bring
in something, at least, to keep the home going at all.

Even when I came of age the conditions were still appalling.
London dockers were on an average getting somewhere in the
neighbourhood of ten shillings a week, sweating was
widespread, slums were festering sores in the State.


=Starving Crowds=

"Unemployment brought a terrible train of consequences,"
says R. H. Gretton, in _A Modern History of the English
People_, 1880-1922, "in that it finally submerged workmen
who could never recover from a fortnight's failure of work,
and were thrust down into pauperism beyond remedy". There
was still no provision for the unemployed; no State help for
the sick; the Poor Law, feared and hated by the poor, and
intermittent charitable efforts remained the only means of
succouring men, women and children out of work or ill
through no fault of their own.

As late as 1903, Mr. Justin McCarthy was writing: "The
workhouses have no space left in which to pack the starving
crowds who are craving every day and night at their doors
for food and shelter. All the charitable institutions have
exhausted their means in trying to raise supplies of food
for the famishing residents of the garrets and cellars of
London's lanes and alleys."

That year there were daily processions of unemployed in the
streets of London carrying collecting boxes and singing,
"The Starving Poor of Old England". That year Jack London,
the famous American novelist, told the tragic story of the
great queues outside London's casual wards, of the numbers
turned away or compelled to walk the streets all night
without home or food.


=What We Have Done=

I do not write this because of any ghoulish desire to look
back over the past, but because I am afraid that many of our
younger people, now enjoying the things for which we fought,
do not sufficiently appreciate all that has been done to
make this old country of ours a better and brighter Britain.
Let me tell them of some other things.


=Unemployment=

Take Unemployment. Altogether about 15-3/4 millions in Great
Britain are now insured against being out of work. Over
four-fifths of the workers in Great Britain earning 250 a
year or less benefit by this scheme.

Thus, in the year ending March 31, 1936 when unemployment
was declining, there were over 4 million claims for
benefit--many of them for short periods, others for long
periods. Under the general scheme (there is a special scheme
for agricultural workers) benefit is paid for 26 weeks in
any insurance year, but persons with exceptionally good
insurance records can be granted benefits up to 52 weeks in
an insurance year. At the outbreak of war the scales of
benefit were: Adult 17_s_. (since raised to 20_s_.), wife
10_s_., child 3_s_. (since raised to 4_s_. for the first
two children).

Some people have tried to throw discredit on this great
social experiment by calling payments made under it "doles".
But this is entirely unfair and improper. Unemployment
insurance pay is a legal right for which the workman,
together with his employer and the State, has paid in equal
shares.

It is one of the privileges and rights of our free country
that men and women who cannot get work through no fault of
their own shall have the opportunity to draw quite
legally--and in a dignified way--the wherewithal to live.

In my younger days we used to fight for "Work or
Maintenance". We have still, unhappily, many unemployed--we
have not got for them the full maintenance we should like,
but we are far away from those days when there was no
provision at all for those without work.

But this is not all. When Statutory Unemployment Benefit is
exhausted, there is the vast machinery of Unemployment
Assistance which continues to operate and to provide further
benefits as long as the recipients remain within the field
of employment.

We have complaints to make against the administration of
Unemployment Assistance; we have opposed the Means Test; we
think that payments should be more generous, but none of us
would deny that there have been tremendous improvements.

And beyond this there is still the machinery of Public
Assistance to come to the aid of the residue of hard cases
outside of Unemployment Assistance.

One thing is certain. No man or woman in this England of
ours need starve. If a person is destitute, if there is not
money coming in to provide the basic needs of life, it is
the duty of the Authorities to come to his assistance in one
form or the other. And this assistance is not alone
concerned with money or food; it also embraces medical
service to supply medicines and surgical aid to those in
need. The old conception of the Poor Law is being broken
down and in its place is being built up the conception of a
broad, humane system of social service through which all our
poorer neighbours will be treated as self-respecting
citizens.


=A Sense of Security=

Just as we may tend to under-estimate the advantages of
Unemployment Insurance and Public Assistance, so we may do
the same with National Health Insurance.

Up to 1912 practically nothing had been done by the State to
help the many men and women--young and old--suffering from
ill-health, who had lost their wages and had not the
necessary money for medical attention, medicines and
surgical appliances. Many men and women have, in the past,
left their homes too ill to work and come to early graves
because they could not afford to take time off, or secure
necessary medical attention. Many, for the same reasons,
developed chronic sickness or incapacity.

I remember this country rocking with political controversy
when State Health Insurance was introduced by Mr. Lloyd
George. Society women organised a great campaign against
"stamp-licking" and lots of people thought it scandalous
that employers should help to pay towards a scheme of Health
Insurance.

All that has died down. Everybody now realises the value of
Health Insurance, even if it be far from perfect. But does
everybody really appreciate what an integral part it is of
the free institutions which we are called upon to defend? So
many people take all these things for granted without
thinking for a moment of what they would lose, of what we
all should lose, if dictatorship triumphed.

Over 18,000,000 people in England and Wales and Scotland are
covered by National Health Insurance. Over 33,000,000
annually is paid out in sickness, disablement, medical and
other benefits. Benefit not only covers sickness pay but
also medical treatment, medicines and drugs and, varying in
amount according to the approved society, optical, dental,
surgical aid and convalescence. There is also maternity
benefit. Figures vary from year to year, but, in a normal
twelve months, Health Insurance benefit is paid to 8,000,000
people.

Workmen's Compensation covers roughly speaking anyone under
a contract of service--that is virtually the whole working
population. For death due to a fatal accident at work,
compensation is paid in lump sums ranging from 200 to 600.
In the case of accidents, weekly payments are made. The
fight to establish for the British workman the right to
compensation for death and injury sustained at work has been
long and sustained. Even now there are many anomalies which
the Trade Unionists would like to amend. But no one out of
Bedlam would deny the progress which has been made since the
first Workmen's Compensation Act was introduced nearly fifty
years ago.

Now there is at least some sense of security for all those
who are injured at work in the great industries of this
country--in cotton, wool, engineering, docks, mines,
railways, shipping and other miscellaneous trades.

As the years go on, industrial diseases which add to the
toll of incapacity or death are embodied in the schedules.
The total liability of employers is estimated to be about
12 to 13 million annually.

For the veterans of industry there are Old Age Pensions.
Over 3,000,000 people over the age of sixty-five at present
draw these pensions of 10_s_. per week, and under new
Government proposals this is to be supplemented for about
275,000 pensioners who at present receive aid from Local
Authorities. In addition another 310,000 women between 60
and 65 are to receive pensions.

This question is still a matter of political controversy and
I shall not comment upon it here. We can argue as we like as
to whether the amount paid is large enough, but our
conclusions will not upset the undeniable fact that much has
been done to give greater comfort and support to the older
people in their declining years. That I want to give them
more does not in the least detract from what has already
been done. And don't forget how, in some parts of the
country, enlightened local authorities have provided housing
and special amenities for the old folk and so greatly
brightened their lives.


=Housing=

I could go on to tell how under successive Governments--of
all parties--the housing conditions of the people have
steadily improved. There are still slums, but they become
fewer. There is still overcrowding, but it is decreasing.

In many of the great centres of population there has been
amazing progress in the last few years. In the fresh air,
away from the smoke of the cities, fine new estates have
arisen, well-planned and soundly built. Roads have improved.
Sanitation and other efficient municipal services have in
most districts lifted up the standard of life of our people
to a most significant extent.

To these improvements I gladly bear testimony. Compared with
when I was a boy the condition of the young people is
immeasurably better. They are better-fed, better-clothed,
better-educated. When I was young, the whole of
working-class life was drab, dull and depressing: to-day
there is colour and variety that many of we older men never
knew.

There is more opportunity for leisure; in the old days all
work and no play made Jack a very dull boy. Hours of labour
are shorter, conditions of employment better, wages higher.
And much of this improved standard is due to the work of the
Trade Union and Labour Movement which has banded men and
women together in democratic organisations in order to make
life more tolerable for all. But, of course, it is not the
work of the Trade Union and Labour Movement only. To
pioneers like Robert Owen and Lord Shaftesbury, to countless
men and women of goodwill who have never identified
themselves with any Party, to progressively minded people in
all the political Parties, the workers and the nation owe an
incalculable debt.

Only recently there has been a new drive for holidays with
pay. There have been initial successes. There will be more.
The day will come when every family in this country will
have the opportunity to take a real holiday every year.

But if I could only convey to my younger readers the true
extent of what has already been done, it would be worth
while writing this pamphlet for that alone. It is indeed
only in recent years that the great bulk of the population
has been able to take any holidays at all. Now they are
becoming a good habit. In the old days a hurried visit to
the seaside for a few hours, or a charabanc outing, was all
that a holiday meant.

Relate that significant change to other remarkable changes
and it is possible to have some idea of what this new and
developing social England means to all of us. And to the
weaving of this fabric of our material life our magnificent
social services have made a great contribution.


=Any Young Couple=

A young couple set out in life. At every stage they come in
contact with the advantages which come from living in this
country with its advanced sense of public responsibility.

Their new house has most likely been built under a State or
municipal housing scheme.

When the first baby is on its way, the mother will, in very
many cases, receive advice and treatment at the local
clinic. The child may first see light of day in a municipal
maternity home, or be brought into the world by a municipal
midwife.

The child welfare centre will keep a watchful eye on the new
arrival; it will be weighed and examined; milk and special
foods will be provided at reduced rates.

At five years, or often before, it will toddle off to a
State school; it will be educated, medically examined, and
later given the chance to go forward to advanced and higher
education.

If the father is out of work or ill, he will claim for
unemployment or health insurance; if he is hurt at work, he
will make a claim for Workmen's Compensation.

If the couple live on to ripe old age, they will be able to
claim from the State, something at least to keep the wolf
from the door in their few remaining years.

All these services--costing the citizen and the community
many millions a year--add enormously to social values in our
country.

They are indeed an addition to real wages. Every improvement
on these lines augments the social income and makes life
easier and better for the vast mass of the common people.


=Looking Back=

My memory goes back again to the "little piecer" who was
myself; to the boys and girls I knew, wakened at four or
five o'clock in the morning, to work twelve or fourteen
hours and then to stagger home half-asleep--only to be
awakened once again in the early morning until life became
one long torture.

I recall once more the earlier days of my Trade Union work
when we were struggling to build up for the people of this
country a decent standard of living with some sense of
status and dignity.

When I remember all that has gone I find it impossible to
understand those people who are unready in these days of
national emergency to stand up for the privileges and rights
we have won for ourselves.

German broadcasters in English may try to score debating
points by calling attention to social injustices which we
have criticised over and over again, but we can do that much
better. They will not deceive the British workers who have
far too much common sense to wish to abandon their solid
advantages for the tyranny and misery of the Nazi State.

For myself, the path of duty is clear. This civilisation of
ours--built on ordered freedom and reason--must be upheld by
every just and right means. To surrender one inch to the
claims of Hitlerism is to endanger everything--moral and
social--which has been built up here. A victory for
Hitlerism would mean the destruction of social services, of
Trade Unionism, and of the standards of life we have
established for our families.

A victory for Hitlerism would level our country down to the
basis of a slave State. I will have none of it and I am
confident that my fellow-countrymen will resist with all
their might and main this menace to their common welfare.


PRINTED BY PURNELL AND SONS, LTD.,
PAULTON (SOMERSET) AND LONDON


MACMILLAN WAR PAMPHLETS

1. LET THERE BE LIBERTY
A. P. HERBERT

2. WAR WITH HONOUR
A. A. MILNE

3. NORDIC TWILIGHT
E. M. FORSTER

4. THE CROOKED CROSS
THE DEAN OF CHICHESTER

5. NAZI AND NAZARENE
RONALD KNOX

6. WHEN I REMEMBER
J. R. CLYNE

7. FOR CIVILIZATION
C. E. M. JOAD

8. THE RIGHTS OF MAN
HAROLD J. LASKI




Transcriber's note:

The edition used as base for this book contained the
following errors, which have been corrected:

    Page 16:
    This is no occasion to dicuss
    => This is no occasion to discuss

    Page 17:
    in 1937-8 which included 16 3s. 2d.
    => in 1937-8 which included 16 3_s_. 2_d_.

[End of _When I Remember..._ by J. R. Clynes]