Arbeit macht frei; Work Sets you Free, The British Labour Camps of the 1930s
It is surprising to learn that a Labour government in Britain set up special re-education camps for the unemployed, designed to bring redemption through hard, physical work
Wrought in iron above the gates of Dachau, the first concentration camp in Nazi Germany, were the words, ‘ARBEIT MACHT FREI’. In German, this means literally, ‘Work makes free’. The implication is that work will bring as its reward, freedom. This same slogan was later placed over the entrance to Auschwitz and it has been widely assumed that this was a fiendish black joke on the part of the SS, in that they knew very well that there was not the slightest possibility of any of the slave labourers in the camps being made free by their work. In fact it is altogether possible that rather than being placed there cynically, as a taunt to the prisoners, this phrase was used quite honestly by those who set up the camps and that it expressed some mystical reverence for the idea of physical work.
The expression ‘Arbeit macht frei’ was not dreamed up by the Nazis, but was actually a slogan of the Weimar Republic, which preceded the Third Reich. Even they did not invent the wording, which is the title of a German novel published in 1873. The book, by Lorenz Diefenbach, tells of the redemption of a group of dissolute gamblers by honest, hard work. This concept, that there is something virtuous and liberating about physical work for its own sake was common in the middle of the twentieth century and lingers on to this day. Unemployment is, even now, seen sometimes as undesirable not simply because it reduces men to poverty, but because the enforced idleness which goes hand in hand with unemployment is viewed as a moral evil, which saps the vitality and worth of those without jobs; leading them on a downwards path which is likely to end in apathy and vice. From this perspective, being without work is bad in itself and society should do all it can to remedy the state of affairs.
The labour camps set up and run in remote rural parts of Britain from 1929 until the outbreak of war in the summer of 1939 were, at least in theory, voluntary establishments, from which any of the inmates could walk out whenever they pleased. There was however a good deal more to it than that. Despite their supposedly voluntary nature, there were eerie similarities between them and the camps set up in Germany at the same time by the Nazis. The idea of both was that men should be reclaimed through honest labour and that those who had hitherto led idle or vicious lives could redeem themselves through hard, purely physical work. Like the concentration camps in Germany, the British labour camps were all in remote areas and few people knew of their existence. Even today, hardly anybody has heard of them.
A word here about the loaded nature of an expression such as ‘labour camps’ might be in order. If concentration camps are inextricably linked in the average person’s mind with Nazi Germany, then labour camps are automatically associated with Soviet Russia. This reflex connection of different kinds of camps with particular countries has only emerged since the end of the Second World War. The term ‘labour camp’ had few negative connotations during the 1930s and was widely used both in parliament and the press. The British camps of that period will accordingly be referred to here as labour camps; which is what they indubitably were.
Few readers will be unfamiliar with the image of poor, starved Oliver Twist in the workhouse, saying, ‘Please sir, I want some more.’ The institution of the workhouse is understood by everybody today to have been a bad one; we rightly believe such places to have been little better than prisons. This is of course perfectly true, but we should also bear in mind that in theory they were, unlike prisons, completely voluntary establishments. Nobody was confined in the workhouse and the inmates were free to leave at any time. Never the less, hardly anybody ever walked out, for the same reason that those in the labour camps of the 1930s did not in general leave.
Until the passing of the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, more commonly known as the New Poor Law, those in England who were poverty stricken due to unemployment could apply for help from the parish in which they lived. This was often provided in the form of ’outdoor relief’; money or food distributed to the poor, who remained living in their own homes. From 1795 onwards, this developed into what became known as the ‘Speenhamland System‘; named after the town of Speen in Berkshire. Assistance was calculated according to both the price of bread and the number of children in a family. Even those who were working were eligible for relief of this sort, which was roughly analogous to today’s supplementary benefit. The system was expensive, being paid from the local rates, and open to abuse. Employers, for instance, would pay lower wages, knowing that their workers could claim relief from the parish which would make up any shortfall in wages.
After 1834, outdoor relief became rare and those who were so poverty-stricken that they were unable to survive had, as their only option, asking to be allowed to enter the workhouse. Conditions in the workhouses were deliberately made as grim and unenticing as possible. It was intended that the standard of living in such places was to be lower than anywhere outside the workhouse. The rationale behind this was to make the workhouse an unattractive prospect for the work-shy and idle. Once there, families were split up, with men living separately from their wives, and children being housed apart from their parents. Inmates wore a degrading uniform and were expected to work for their food, by picking oakum, for example.
Although those in workhouses could leave at any time if they wished, many faced the prospect of starvation if they did so. In 1844, the government passed the Outdoor Relief Prohibitory Order, which tightened up the system still further and ensured that no aid was offered to the unemployed or poor, other than by their entering the workhouse. Since the alternative to the workhouse could literally be death, it is debateable whether or not we can really say that those living in these institutions were there voluntarily.
Surprisingly, workhouses were not officially abolished until the passing of the 1929 Local Government Act, which came into force on 1 April 1930. Even then, some workhouses were renamed Public Assistance Institutions and continued operating for another decade. As late as 1939, the year that the Second World War began, there were still 100,000 people, including over 5,000 children in such establishments.
At about the same time that the workhouses were being abolished, a Labour government led by Ramsay McDonald was getting to grips with the effects of the Great Depression. This gloomy period of economic stagnation gripped the world from 1930 until roughly the end of World War II. In some parts of Britain, unemployment rose to shocking levels; 30 per cent of workers in Glasgow were out of work at the height of the depression. This was roughly the figure for South Wales as a whole. Unemployment was worst in industrial and mining areas; South Wales, the North of England and other such places. In some places, almost every man was out of work. The unemployment rate in the Welsh town of Taff‘s Well was 82 per cent. In the south of Britain, things were much better and agriculture was experiencing a boom during the 1930s. Factories such as those manufacturing motor cars were also booming; in stark contrast to the shipyards of the North of England. If only some of those unemployed miners and factory workers could be persuaded to move away from the so-called ‘distressed areas’ and go where there were jobs to be found in the rural economy and factories of south east England, it was thought by those in government that much of the suffering could be alleviated.
Even without any government initiatives to encourage the movement of workers from the depressed areas, many families moved to more prosperous locations where work was available. Between 1921 and 1940, some 440,000 people left Wales; 85 per cent of them from Glamorgan and Monmouthshire, where unemployment was highest.
In many ways, the situation in Britain during the Great Depression of the thirties was precisely the opposite of that faced by the country in 1834, when the New Poor Law had come into effect. At that time, as the Industrial Revolution gathered pace, the aim had been to get unemployed rural workers from the countryside to seek jobs in the new factories being opened in the Midlands and North of England. One objective of the 1834 law had been to encourage this shift from the countryside to the town. Now, in the aftermath of the Wall Street Crash, it was thought that some of Britain’s difficulties could be overcome if all those people standing idly on the street corners of Manchester, Glasgow and various Welsh mining towns could somehow be transported to farms and given jobs as agricultural labourers. The problem was of course that they stubbornly insisted on remaining where they were and did not have any desire at all to leave the districts where they had grown up and where all their family and friends were living. They would need to be given a nudge.
When Ramsay McDonald formed a minority Labour government in the summer of 1929, he appointed the first ever woman to the cabinet. Margaret Bondfield was 56 and had previously been a junior minister in McDonald’s 1924 administration. Now, she was given the post of Minister of Labour. At that time, unemployment was already a serious problem; over a million people were either on the dole or claiming unemployment benefit. The previous Conservative government under Stanley Baldwin had tinkered with the problem of long-term unemployment which afflicted certain areas, but without any noticeable result. Now, the new Minister for Labour was determined to tackle the scourge head on.
Under the Conservatives, a number of centres had been set up to retrain men and equip them with the skills which might enable them to be more attractive to potential employers. Those who were claiming the dole were invited to attend these institutions. There was a marked reluctance among the unemployed to travel miles to stay in residential centres, as this would mean leaving their friends and family behind. Margaret Bondfield had no patience for pussyfooting around the question and told the cabinet on 23 December 1929 that she wished to remove any choice in the matter and compel men to go and live in what were now being termed ’Transfer Instructional Centres’. She said at the cabinet meeting that day that she was most concerned about men who were unlikely to obtain work without a ’course of reconditioning’, and referred bitterly to those who refused ’to avail themselves of the offer of training’.
There sounds something a little sinister about the idea of ’reconditioning’ men, but Bondfield was not the only person in the Ministry of Labour who was using this expression. A year earlier F.G. Bowers, a civil servant in the Ministry of Labour, had prepared a memo in which he talked of unemployed men who had gone ’soft’ and of the need for them to be ’hardened’ at special centres.
It is time to look at what these Transfer Instructional Centres, later called simply Instructional Centres, actually were. To all intents and purposes, they were labour camps, where ’soft’ men would be ’reconditioned’ and ’hardened’. This process would be accomplished by means of rough living for a few months, during which the men would spend their days engaged in the heaviest kind of physical labour; digging ditches, breaking stones, felling trees and sawing timber. The camps were all in remote, out-of-the-way places and the intention was that after they had been reconditioned, it might be possible for the men to obtain work of this sort on the land, far from the areas of high unemployment from which they came.
Accommodation in the camps was basic, similar perhaps to that provided in army barracks. The food was adequate and filling and the men sent there lived a life in many ways like that of soldiers. They were issued with heavy work clothes and cutlery and lived in wooden huts.
The compulsion used to get men to agree to leave their homes and live under fairly harsh conditions of this sort was simple, but devastatingly effective. Those who refused to take up a place at the camp to which they had been allocated would no longer be entitled to any unemployment benefit or dole. For men with families, this was a most potent means of persuasion, involving as it did the threat of hardship and even starvation for their wives and children.
Before looking in greater detail at life in the camps, it is instructive to compare what was happening in Britain with similar projects being undertaken in Nazi Germany at roughly the same time. On 20 March 1933, the office of Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, issued a press release about a new facility which was being set up near Munich.
Communist functionaries, Reichsbanner and Marxist functionaries who
threaten the security of the state will be assembled here. Leaving
individual Communist functionaries in the courthouse jails is not
possible for the long term without putting too much strain on the
apparatus of the state.
Life in the new camp did not sound particularly disagreeable;
The Dachau camp consists of over 20 one to two-story stone buildings,
each of which can hold 200 to 250 men. At first the occupancy of the
camp will gradually increase to 2,500 men and will possibly be expanded to
5,000 men later. A labour service detachment recently prepared the
barrack for the first 200 men and secured it for the time being with a
barrier of triple barbed-wire. The first job of the camp inmates will be
to restore the other stone buildings, which are very run-down.
Once that is accomplished, they will be led out in small groups of
about 50 men into the countryside, where extensive land cultivation
projects wait to be implemented. Perhaps later, some of the camp
inmates will be offered the possibility of settling here.
Reading through this account, there appear to be few differences between the regime at Dachau and that at the labour camps which were being opened, first by the Labour government and then later the National Government, in 1930s Britain. Just as in Britain, there was the idea that ’reconditioning’ men might be good for them, combined with the possibility that they might wish to move to another part of the country and earn their daily bread in this way in the future. According to Himmler’s office, this was just the sort of thing that was going on at the Third Reich’s first concentration camp. After the inmates had learned how to work properly, these same men might even wish to stay at Dachau and settle on the land permanently!
As a matter of fact, there almost certainly were very few differences between Dachau and the British labour camps at that time. One person who visited Dachau concentration camp in 1936 and was very favourably impressed by what he saw was former British Prime Minister David Lloyd George. He talked enthusiastically of the virtues of good, honest labour and spoke of the men he had seen, stripped to their waists, who were digging ditches around the camp. For Lloyd George at least, the idea that ‘Arbeit macht Frei’ was a sound and desirable one.
Lloyd George was not the only British visitor to the German concentration camps to find the treatment of the inmates quite acceptable. On 4 October 1933, the Manchester Guardian, forerunner of today’s Guardian, published a letter from Brigadier-General R.B.D. Blakeney; who had just recently returned from a visit to Germany, Brigadier Blakeney had on 13 September been shown round the Sonnenberg concentration camp, which was not far from the Polish border. The Brigadier found everything at Sonnenberg to be eminently satisfactory. He wrote:
The prisoners did not appear to be ill-treated, so much so that three
Who were just being released looked clean, healthy, and much
improved by their regime of daily baths, regular meals, physical drill
and discipline.
As far as Brigadier Blakeney was concerned, a couple of months in a concentration camp was roughly comparable to a spell in the army; an experience which was fundamentally beneficial to those subjected to it. In fact the descriptions that Lloyd George, Brigadier Blakeney and many others at that time give of the German concentration camps is practically indistinguishable from what unemployed men in the British labour camps would have been familiar with. Physical exercise, discipline, regular meals, daily baths and roughing it a little in wooden huts; who could possibly object to such a regime?
There can be no doubt that in the 1930s, both in Germany and Britain, there was a feeling that arbeit did indeed macht frei! Nothing like a spot of digging ditches and so on for toughening men up and making them fit to live once more in ordinary society. It is perhaps significant that while the British had named their camps ‘Instructional Centres’. the Germans at first intended that their own, similar, establishments should be known as ‘Re-education Centres’. Whatever the name eventually chosen, the camps themselves were astonishingly similar.
At the time, the Instructional Centres were generally referred to by those being sent to them as work camps or labour camps. Some left wing political groups denounced them as concentration camps. Plate 7 shows a leaflet in which the Instructional Centres were described in this way. This was a touchy point for those actually running the places; with the German camps beginning to acquire an unwholesome reputation for themselves, few officials in Britain wished to be thought of as connected with concentration camps. Even the word ‘camp’ was avoided wherever possible. In 1935, an official of the Unemployment Assistance Board was worried about the terminology being used by civil servants. He wrote;
Above all, the word ‘camp’ must never be applies to any open-air training
schemes. The communist orators and pamphleteers have been quick to
play upon unpleasant association of ideas by denouncing such
organisations as ‘Concentration Camps’.
It is time to look in detail at the extent to which the British camps could really be considered ‘voluntary’. From 1930 onwards, Ramsay McDonald’s government was doing everything possible to balance the budget. Exports were falling and unemployment rising steeply. It was thought that the only way to restore international confidence in the pound was to make savage cuts in public expenditure. This is a familiar problem today and the present British government is seeking to perform precisely the same surgery on public spending. Now as then, one area for savings is likely to be the benefits being paid to those on social security.
For Ramsay McDonald’s administration, the financial crisis was infinitely worse than that currently facing the Coalition government of Britain. Since unemployment benefits were soaring, the National Government hit firstly upon the idea of slashing all payments by 10 per cent and then taking steps to see if they could not avoid paying out money altogether to some families. This was the much hated ‘means test’.
Those who had paid enough contributions under the 1911 Insurance Act were entitled to claim six months unemployment benefit if they were out of work. These payments were unconditional and the means test was not applied to them. If a person was still unemployed after six months, then the 1921 Insurance Act provided for further ‘uncovenanted benefit’. These payments were given grudgingly and with reluctance; they were ‘doled’ out. Hence the use of the expression, ‘the dole’. The benefits under this scheme were kept as low as possible by examining every aspect of the person’s life; all savings and any source of income whatsoever were taken into account. When ordinary unemployment benefit was being claimed, a man’s wife could be supplementing the family income by taking in washing or charring, the children might be doing paper rounds. When calculating the amount to hand out for the dole, any such income was measured and the payments made to the unemployed head of the family reduced accordingly. The aim was to give the absolute bare minimum which would keep body and soul together.
At first, the so-called ‘dole’ was distributed by the local Public Assistance Committees which had replaced the old Poor Law Guardians. In 1934, a National Assistance Board was created, which dictated to the last penny, exactly how much assistance should be offered to the unemployed.
This strict approach to the paying out of benefits may or may not have been good for the British economy as a whole. What is certain is that it left millions of people living on the edge of malnutrition. Government research during the 1930s suggested that about a quarter of the British population were at that time living on a subsistence diet, with dietary deficiencies common and resultant disorders such as rickets being endemic in some areas. In the ‘Special Areas’, such as South Wales, things were often far worse than in the rest of the country. There were epidemics of scarlet fever and the incidence of tuberculosis in Wales was running at 130 per cent higher than for the rest of the United Kingdom. A quarter of all Welsh miners between the ages of 25 and 34 had lost all their teeth.
It is in this context that we must look at the idea that going off to an Instructional Centre for three months was a voluntary undertaking. When a man, and sometimes his family, are on the verge of starvation and wholly dependent on state benefits, then the threat of withdrawing those benefits entirely is a chilling one. The great majority of those ‘offered’ the chance of a spell in an instructional centre would probably have declined; all else being equal.
The focus of the efforts to ‘re-train’ unemployed men were the four so-called ‘special areas’; the north-east coast of England, West Cumberland, Scotland and South Wales. In these parts of Britain, unemployment was running throughout the 1930s at about 33 per cent. Half the men in those places had been without work for a year or more; in some cases, much longer than that. There was also widespread unemployment in other parts of the country; Manchester and the cities of the Midlands, for example. The slowdown in mining and industry meant that there was no realistic prospect of creating new jobs in these places. That being so, the logical solution was to move the unemployed men and their families to other parts of the United Kingdom where there were jobs.
This was one strand of the policy which saw the setting up of the labour camps. Another fear was that after being on the dole for years, many of these men had grown mentally and physically unfit for work. They were soft and flabby and the enforced idleness had sapped their moral; leaving them lazy and apathetic. What they needed was rousing and being given a bit of a shock to get them moving again. They also needed to be prepared psychologically for the idea that they might have to leave where they were currently living and move to the other end of the country. Most had previously worked in factories, mines and shipyards, but these kind of jobs were no longer available. Very well then, they must be shown how to do other kinds of work; the sort of work for which there was a demand. They would, in other words, have to go where the jobs were, rather than hang around the street corners of the towns in depressed areas; chatting and smoking with their pals.
This then was the theory behind the camps. It was, without doubt, a well-meaning effort on behalf of the government, although one doomed to failure. The fact is, people simply do not wish to uproot themselves and go to live somewhere where they know nobody, have no family or friends and work among a lot of strangers. This is still largely the case today, but in the 1930s such feelings were even stronger. Many people grew up, married, worked and raised their children just round the corner from where they had themselves been born and gone to school. It was not uncommon at that time for a man to live only a couple of streets away from his own parents and this was especially so in districts like the valleys of South Wales. The idea of being forced to move to Essex or Kent would have struck such men as unthinkable. It would have been a form of internal exile, the sort of thing that one would expect in the Soviet Union rather than Britain.
Still, with the alternative of losing all assistence from either the local parish or any state benefits, the men invited to join this scheme really had little choice. It was compulsion in all but name and over 200,000 men ended up unwillingly spending time in one of camps. Annual admissions to the Instructional Centres rose sharply from 1929, until over 23,000 men a year were being sent to them. Here are the annual figures for admission to the camps from 1929 to 1938;
1929 3,518
1930 9,886
1931 11,170
1932 16,540
1933 21,715
1934 22,788
1935 18,474
1936 24,146
1937 20,588
1938 23,772
The number of camps operating fluctuated from year to year, as new ones opened and others closed. At any one time though, there were about 30 running; each with the capacity to hold between 150 and 200 men. Almost without exception, they were built in remote areas; far away from villages and towns. There was no sinister reason for establishing them in isolated spots, it was simply that they were mostly built on land belonging to the Forestry Commission, which mean that they were bound to be in, or on the edges of, forests. This meant that there was plenty of outdoor labouring available for the men, which was, after all, the object of the exercise.
Most of those who ended up in the labour camps had worked only indoors or underground in factories and mines. Undertaking hard, physical work in the open air was a novel experience for them. The work varied between hauling and sawing up logs, to breaking stones in a quarry. The food provided was filling and nutritious. It was thought that many working class men had grown puny and undersized while out of work and the aim was to build up their bodies a little and make them fit for hard work again.
It has to be said that the regime in the camps was certainly not cruel or harsh. It was perhaps no tougher than being in the army for a few months. The men slept in corrugated-iron Nissen huts; 15 or 20 to a hut. They were issued on arrival at the camp with cutlery, work clothes and bedding and were expected to keep their huts clean and tidy. Many of the instructors working at the camps were themselves ex-soldiers, often Sergeant-Majors, and there was an air of military discipline. The men in some camps were, for instance, marched to and fro in squads and ordered to parade for work in the morning. At night, a roll call was held to ensure that nobody had gone missing.
The course of instruction at the camps lasted for three months, which was a long time for men to be separated from their friends and family. They were however given a rail warrant to enable them to visit their homes once a month. Although there were attempts to provide recreation for the men, in the form of lectures, sports and so on; the focus, and ultimate purpose, of the camps was of course work.
One of the things that many men who spent their three month periods at these camps remarked, was that the work appeared to be undertaken for its own sake and not really for the purpose of training anybody in anything useful. Stones were quarried and broken into small pieces with sledge hammers, so that they could be used for road building, tree trunks were sawn into sections, tree roots were dug up and land cleared. It was almost as though they were being made to undertake hard, physical labour for no other reason than to make them exhausted. There may well have been something in this. There was an official concern during the Depression that unemployed men were becoming ‘soft’ and ‘flabby’. It was for this reason that they were to be ‘reconditioned’; made fit and strong once more and ready to take up labouring jobs.
It is curious to note that unemployment and poverty are in Britain today, often associated with obesity. During the Great Depression; the case was quite different. The main concern about manual workers who were seeking work was that they were under-nourished and thin. On arrival at the camps, the men were weighed and the hope was that with the filling, carbohydrate-rich food which was provided, that they would put on weight. Any weight put on would be in the form of muscle and not fat. Work began at 6:0 am and typically lasted for ten or twelve hours. The men would be absolutely ravenous after such exertion and as much food as required could be eaten.
How successful was this scheme of social engineering? Did it help to move unemployed workers from the Special Areas and into those parts of the country where jobs were more plentiful? In fact, the Instructional centres failed on both counts. Hundreds of thousands of people moved from the Special Areas and obtained work elsewhere, but this was almost invariably as a result of personal initiative on the part of those concerned, rather than as a consequence of any government scheme. As far as the men who returned from their stint at a labour camp; their prospects remained as dismal as ever. Only 10 per cent of those who had spent their three months in an Instructional Centre went on to find work. It was the view of many who had spent time in such establishments, that going there had actually had the effect of reducing their chances of finding work. The reason was that news of jobs was often passed by word of mouth around the tightly knit communities of the mining and manufacturing towns. Somebody’s uncle or brother might recommend a man to a foreman taking on new workers or a mate might hear of some opportunity. Being sent hundreds of mile away from three months, removed a man from this informal but often highly effective sort of networking and he then missed any jobs which cropped up while he was away.
The British experiment with labour camps had not been a success and it is open to question whether the true aim of sending men to these places was really to help prepare them for working in the field of agriculture. It is by no means impossible that the system of camps was set up more to galvanise people into action and compel them to make some more effort of their own to find work. It would be wrong to describe them as being punitive, but there was perhaps a school of thought in London, among both cabinet ministers and civil servants, which held that much of the problem in the depressed parts of the country were due to idleness. Newsreel films showed unemployed miners standing around on street corners in South Wales; seemingly idling their time away in smoking and chatting to other men with nothing to do. Why weren’t such men out looking actively for new work? Clearly, it was believed by some of those in authority, these were people who had just given up! They needed a bit of a shock and had to be given the incentive to pull themselves together again and help themselves.
This unspoken assumption, that the unemployed have a tendency to get used to a life on benefits and to stop looking for another job, is still a fairly common one today in certain official circles. Every so often, some politican will come up with an idea like ’workfare’, where those claiming to be unable to find a job will be made to work publicly in order to earn their benefits. This sort of thing is not meant to be pleasant; it is supposed to serve as a wake-up call. It is into this category that we should perhaps place the Instructional Centres of the 1930s.
A fascinating and historically revealing article Simon as is often the case. It was all new to me. I would actually like to see those claiming benefits to be made to work for their taxpayer funded handout. I think it would be good for them and earn them self respect and the mutual respect of those funding them. If there's such a housing shortage in our country let's get them working at renovating the old buildings and making them liveable again, even for themselves to live in.
Apparently Canada had work camps for unemployed men in the 1930s. I read about it in a book written by Pierre Berton - a famous TV, newsprint, radio personality & author in the 1960s & 1970s in Toronto. I recall the men were allowed to leave but because the camps where in such desolate areas one would starve trying to get away & certainly face hardship once they did get to an urban centre.