---
title: "The Road to Wigan Pier"
author: "George Orwell"
languages: [en]
shelf: "Literature"
section: 5 of 13
url: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-wigan-pier-fp20180878/5/
cite: "George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, section 5. Scriptura (scriptura.si), https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-wigan-pier-fp20180878/5/"
---

# The Road to Wigan Pier

*George Orwell*

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> Title: The Road to Wigan Pier
Date of first publication: 1937
Author: George Orwell (1903-1950)
Date first posted: Aug. 21, 2018
Date last updated: Aug. 21, 2018
Faded Page eBook #20180878

> This eBook was produced by: Delphine Lettau, Howard Ross
& the online Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at http://www.pgdpcanada.net

> GEORGE ORWELL

> _The Road_
                            _to Wigan Pier_

> First published by Victor Gollancz 1947
     Uniform Edition published by Martin Seeker & Warburg Ltd 1949
                    Published in Penguin Books 1962

> Copyright 1937 by Eric Blair

> TRANSCRIBER NOTES

> Hyphenation of words has been made consistent.

> The abbreviation WC has been capitalised.

> [The end of _The Road to Wigan Pier_ by George Orwell]

## 5. V

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-wigan-pier-fp20180878/5/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-wigan-pier-fp20180878/5/#p-N

[¶0] When you see the unemployment figures quoted at two millions, it is
fatally easy to take this as meaning that two million people are out of
work and the rest of the population is comparatively comfortable. I
admit that till recently I was in the habit of doing so myself. I used
to calculate that if you put the registered unemployed at round about
two millions and threw in the destitute and those who for one reason and
another were not registered, you might take the number of underfed
people in England (for _everyone_ on the dole or thereabouts is
underfed) as being, at the very most, five millions.

[¶1] This is an enormous under-estimate, because, in the first place, the
only people shown on unemployment figures are those actually drawing the
dole—that is, in general, heads of families. An unemployed man's
dependants do not figure on the list unless they too are drawing a
separate allowance. A Labour Exchange officer told me that to get at the
real number of people _living on_ (not drawing) the dole, you have got
to multiply the official figures by something over three. This alone
brings the number of unemployed to round about six millions. But in
addition there are great numbers of people who are in work but who, from
a financial point of view, might equally well be unemployed, because
they are not drawing anything that can be described as a living wage.[1]
Allow for these and their dependants, throw in as before the old-age
pensioners, the destitute and other nondescripts, and you get an
_underfed_ population of well over ten millions. Sir John Orr puts it at
twenty millions.

[¶2] Take the figures for Wigan, which is typical enough of the industrial
and mining districts. The number of insured workers is round about
36,000 (26,000 men and 10,000 women). Of these, the number unemployed at
the beginning of 1936 was about 10,000. But this was in winter when the
mines are working full time; in summer it would probably be 12,000.
Multiply by three, as above, and you get 30,000 or 36,000. The total
population of Wigan is a little under 87,000; so that at any moment more
than one person in three out of the whole population—not merely the
registered workers—is either drawing or living on the dole. Those ten
or twelve thousand unemployed contain a steady core of from four to five
thousand miners who have been continuously unemployed for the past seven
years. And Wigan is not especially badly off as industrial towns go.
Even in Sheffield, which has been doing well for the last year or so
because of wars and rumours of war, the proportion of unemployment is
about the same—one in three of registered workers unemployed.

[¶3] When a man is first unemployed, until his insurance stamps are
exhausted, he draws 'full benefit', of which the rates are as follows:

[¶4] _per week_
                Single man                 17_s._
                Wife                        9_s._
                Each child below 14         3_s._

[¶5] Thus in a typical family of parents and three children of whom one was
over 14, the total income would be 32_s._ per week, plus anything that
might be earned by the eldest child. When a man's stamps are exhausted,
before being turned over to the PAC (Public Assistance Committee), he
receives twenty-six weeks' 'transitional benefit' from the UAB
(Unemployment Assistance Board), the rates being as follows:

[¶6] _per week_
                Single man                 15_s._
                Man and wife               24_s._
                Children, 14-18             6_s._
                Children, 11-14             4_s._ 6_d._
                Children, 8-11              4_s._
                Children, 5-8               3_s._ 6_d._
                Children, 3-5               3_s._

[¶7] Thus on the UAB the income of the typical family of five persons would
be 37_s._ 6_d._ a week if no child was in work. When a man is on the UAB
a quarter of his dole is regarded as rent, with a minimum of 7_s._ 6_d._
a week. If the rent he is paying is more than a quarter of his dole he
receives an extra allowance, but if it is less than 7_s._ 6_d._, a
corresponding amount is deducted. Payments on the PAC theoretically come
out of the local rates, but are backed by a central fund. The rates of
benefit are:

[¶8] _per week_
                Single man                 12_s._ 6_d._
                Man and wife               23_s._
                Eldest child                4_s._
                Any other child             3_s._

[¶9] Being at the discretion of the local bodies these rates vary slightly,
and a single man may or may not get an extra 2_s._ 6_d._ weekly,
bringing his benefit up to 15_s._ As on the UAB, a quarter of a married
man's dole is regarded as rent. Thus in the typical family considered
above the total income would be 33_s._ a week, a quarter of this being
regarded as rent. In addition, in most districts a coal allowance of
1_s._ 6_d._ a week (1_s._ 6_d._ is equivalent to about a hundredweight
of coal) is granted for six weeks before and six weeks after Christmas.

[¶10] It will be seen that the income of a family on the dole normally
averages round about thirty shillings a week. One can write at least a
quarter of this off as rent, which is to say that the average person,
child or adult, has got to be fed, clothed, warmed, and otherwise
cared-for for six or seven shillings a week. Enormous groups of people,
probably at least a third of the whole population of the industrial
areas, are living at this level. The Means Test is very strictly
enforced, and you are liable to be refused relief at the slightest hint
that you are getting money from another source. Dock-labourers, for
instance, who are generally hired by the half day, have to sign on at a
Labour Exchange twice daily; if they fail to do so it is assumed that
they have been working and their dole is reduced correspondingly. I have
seen cases of evasion of the Means Test, but I should say that in the
industrial towns, where there is still a certain amount of communal life
and everyone has neighbours who know him, it is much harder than it
would be in London. The usual method is for a young man who is actually
living with his parents to get an accommodation address, so that
supposedly he has a separate establishment and draws a separate
allowance. But there is much spying and tale-bearing. One man I knew,
for instance, was seen feeding his neighbour's chickens while the
neighbour was away. It was reported to the authorities that he 'had a
job feeding chickens' and he had great difficulty in refuting this. The
favourite joke in Wigan was about a man who was refused relief on the
ground that he 'had a job carting firewood'. He had been seen, it was
said, carting firewood at night. He had to explain that he was not
carting firewood but doing a moonlight flit. The 'firewood' was his
furniture.

[¶11] The most cruel and evil effect of the Means Test is the way in which it
breaks up families. Old people, sometimes bedridden, are driven out of
their homes by it. An old-age pensioner, for instance, if a widower,
would normally live with one or other of his children; his weekly ten
shillings goes towards the household expenses, and probably he is not
badly cared for. Under the Means Test, however, he counts as a 'lodger'
and if he stays at home his children's dole will be docked. So, perhaps
at seventy or seventy-five years of age, he has to turn out into
lodgings, handing his pension over to the lodging-house keeper and
existing on the verge of starvation. I have seen several cases of this
myself. It is happening all over England at this moment, thanks to the
Means Test.

[¶12] Nevertheless, in spite of the frightful extent of unemployment, it is a
fact that poverty—extreme poverty—is less in evidence in the
industrial North than it is in London. Everything is poorer and
shabbier, there are fewer motor-cars and fewer well-dressed people; but
also there are fewer people who are obviously destitute. Even in a town
the size of Liverpool or Manchester you are struck by the fewness of the
beggars. London is a sort of whirlpool which draws derelict people
towards it, and it is so vast that life there is solitary and anonymous.
Until you break the law nobody will take any notice of you, and you can
go to pieces as you could not possibly do in a place where you had
neighbours who knew you. But in the industrial towns the old communal
way of life has not yet broken up, tradition is still strong and almost
everyone has a family—potentially, therefore, a home. In a town of
50,000 or 100,000 inhabitants there is no casual and as it were
unaccounted-for population; nobody sleeping in the streets, for
instance. Moreover, there is just this to be said for the unemployment
regulations, that they do not discourage people from marrying. A man and
wife on twenty-three shillings a week are not far from the starvation
line, but they can make a home of sorts; they are vastly better off than
a single man on fifteen shillings. The life of a single unemployed man
is dreadful. He lives sometimes in a common lodging-house, more often in
a 'furnished' room for which he usually pays six shillings a week,
finding himself as best he can on the other nine (say six shillings a
week for food and three for clothes, tobacco and amusements). Of course
he cannot feed or look after himself properly, and a man who pays six
shillings a week for his room is not encouraged to be indoors more than
is necessary. So he spends his days loafing in the public library or any
other place where he can keep warm. That—keeping warm—is almost the
sole preoccupation of a single unemployed man in winter. In Wigan a
favourite refuge was the pictures, which are fantastically cheap there.
You can always get a seat for fourpence, and at the matinée at some
houses you can even get a seat for twopence. Even people on the verge of
starvation will readily pay twopence to get out of the ghastly cold of a
winter afternoon. In Sheffield I was taken to a public hall to listen to
a lecture by a clergyman, and it was by a long way the silliest and
worst-delivered lecture I have ever heard or ever expect to hear. I
found it physically impossible to sit it out; indeed my feet carried me
out, seemingly of their own accord, before it was half way through. Yet
the hall was thronged with unemployed men; they would have sat through
far worse drivel for the sake of a warm place to shelter in.

[¶13] At times I have seen unmarried men on the dole living in the extreme of
misery. In one town I remember a whole colony of them who were
squatting, more or less illicitly, in a derelict house which was
practically falling down. They had collected a few scraps of furniture,
presumably off refuse-tips, and I remember that their sole table was an
old marble-topped wash-hand-stand. But this kind of thing is
exceptional. A working-class bachelor is a rarity, and so long as a man
is married unemployment makes comparatively little alteration in his way
of life. His home is impoverished but it is still a home, and it is
noticeable everywhere that the anomalous position created by
unemployment—the man being out of work while the woman's work continues
as before—has not altered the relative status of the sexes. In a
working-class home it is the man who is the master and not, as in a
middle-class home, the woman or the baby. Practically never, for
instance, in a working-class home, will you see the man doing a stroke
of the housework. Unemployment has not changed this convention, which on
the face of it seems a little unfair. The man is idle from morning to
night but the woman is as busy as ever—more so, indeed, because she has
to manage with less money. Yet so far as my experience goes the women do
not protest. I believe that they, as well as the men, feel that a man
would lose his manhood if, merely because he was out of work, he
developed into a 'Mary Ann'.

[¶14] But there is no doubt about the deadening, debilitating effect of
unemployment upon everybody, married or single, and upon men more than
upon women. The best intellects will not stand up against it. Once or
twice it has happened to me to meet unemployed men of genuine literary
ability; there are others whom I haven't met but whose work I
occasionally see in the magazines. Now and again, at long intervals,
these men will produce an article or a short story which is quite
obviously better than most of the stuff that gets whooped up by the
blurb-reviewers. Why, then, do they make so little use of their talents?
They have all the leisure in the world; why don't they sit down and
write books? Because to write books you need not only comfort and
solitude—and solitude is never easy to attain in a working-class
home—you also need peace of mind. You can't settle to anything, you
can't command the spirit of _hope_ in which anything has got to be
created, with that dull evil cloud of unemployment hanging over you.
Still, an unemployed man who feels at home with books can at any rate
occupy himself by reading. But what about the man who cannot read
without discomfort? Take a miner, for instance, who has worked in the
pit since childhood and has been trained to be a miner and nothing else.
How the devil is he to fill up the empty days? It is absurd to say that
he ought to be looking for work. There is no work to look for, and
everybody knows it. You can't go on looking for work every day for seven
years. There are allotments, which occupy the time and help to feed a
family, but in a big town there are only allotments for a small
proportion of the people. Then there are the occupational centres which
were started a few years ago to help the unemployed. On the whole this
movement has been a failure, but some of the centres are still
flourishing. I have visited one or two of them. There are shelters where
the men can keep warm and there are periodical classes in carpentering,
boot-making, leather-work, handloom-weaving, basket-work, sea-grass
work, etc. etc.; the idea being that the men can make furniture and so
forth, not for sale but for their own homes, getting tools free and
materials cheaply. Most of the Socialists I have talked to denounce this
movement as they denounce the project—it is always being talked about
but it never comes to anything—to give the unemployed small-holdings.
They say that the occupational centres are simply a device to keep the
unemployed quiet and give them the illusion that something is being done
for them. Undoubtedly that is the underlying motive. Keep a man busy
mending boots and he is less likely to read the _Daily Worker_. Also
there is a nasty YMCA atmosphere about these places which you can feel
as soon as you go in. The unemployed men who frequent them are mostly of
the cap-touching type—the type who tells you oilily that he is
'Temperance' and votes Conservative. Yet even here you feel yourself
torn both ways. For probably it is better that a man should waste his
time even with such rubbish as sea-grass work than that for years upon
end he should do absolutely _nothing_.

[¶15] By far the best work for the unemployed is being done by the
NUWM—National Unemployed Workers' Movement. This is a revolutionary
organisation intended to hold the unemployed together, stop them
blacklegging during strikes and give them legal advice against the Means
Test. It is a movement that has been built out of nothing by the pennies
and efforts of the unemployed themselves. I have seen a good deal of the
NUWM, and I greatly admire the men, ragged and underfed like the others,
who keep the organisation going. Still more I admire the tact and
patience with which they do it; for it is not easy to coax even a
penny-a-week subscription out of the pockets of people on the PAC. As I
said earlier, the English working class do not show much capacity for
leadership, but they have a wonderful talent for organisation. The whole
trade union movement testifies to this; so do the excellent
working-men's clubs—really a sort of glorified co-operative pub, and
splendidly organised—which are so common in Yorkshire. In many towns
the NUWM have shelters and arrange speeches by Communist speakers. But
even at these shelters the men who go there do nothing but sit round the
stove and occasionally play a game of dominoes. If this movement could
be combined with something along the lines of the occupational centres,
it would be nearer what is needed. It is a deadly thing to see a skilled
man running to seed, year after year, in utter, hopeless idleness. It
ought not to be impossible to give him the chance of using his hands and
making furniture and so forth for his own home, without turning him into
a YMCA cocoa-drunkard. We may as well face the fact that several million
men in England will—unless another war breaks out—never have a real
job this side the grave. One thing that probably could be done and
certainly ought to be done as a matter of course, is to give every
unemployed man a patch of ground and free tools if he chose to apply for
them. It is disgraceful that men who are expected to keep alive on the
PAC should not even have the chance to grow vegetables for their
families.

[¶16] To study unemployment and its effects you have got to go to the
industrial areas. In the South unemployment exists, but it is scattered
and queerly unobtrusive. There are plenty of rural districts where a man
out of work is almost unheard-of, and you don't anywhere see the
spectacle of whole blocks of cities living on the dole and the PAC. It
is only when you lodge in streets where nobody has a job, where getting
a job seems about as probable as owning an aeroplane and much _less_
probable than winning fifty pounds in the Football Pool, that you begin
to grasp the changes that are being worked in our civilisation. For a
change _is_ taking place, there is no doubt about that. The attitude of
the submerged working class is profoundly different from what it was
seven or eight years ago.

[¶17] I first became aware of the unemployment problem in 1928. At that time I
had just come back from Burma, where unemployment was only a word, and I
had gone to Burma when I was still a boy and the post-war boom was not
quite over. When I first saw unemployed men at close quarters, the thing
that horrified and amazed me was to find that many of them were
_ashamed_ of being unemployed. I was very ignorant, but not so ignorant
as to imagine that when the loss of foreign markets pushes two million
men out of work, those two million are any more to blame than the people
who draw blanks in the Calcutta Sweep. But at that time nobody cared to
admit that unemployment was inevitable, because this meant admitting
that it would probably continue. The middle classes were still talking
about 'lazy idle loafers on the dole' and saying that 'these men could
all find work if they wanted to', and naturally these opinions
percolated to the working class themselves. I remember the shock of
astonishment it gave me, when I first mingled with tramps and beggars,
to find that a fair proportion, perhaps a quarter, of these beings whom
I had been taught to regard as cynical parasites, were decent young
miners and cotton-workers gazing at their destiny with the same sort of
dumb amazement as an animal in a trap. They simply could not understand
what was happening to them. They had been brought up to work, and
behold! it seemed as if they were never going to have the chance of
working again. In their circumstances it was inevitable, at first, that
they should be haunted by a feeling of personal degradation. That was
the attitude towards unemployment in those days: it was a disaster which
happened to _you_ as an individual and for which _you_ were to blame.

[¶18] When a quarter of a million miners are unemployed, it is part of the
order of things that Alf Smith, a miner living in the back-streets of
Newcastle, should be out of work. Alf Smith is merely one of the quarter
million, a statistical unit. But no human being finds it easy to regard
himself as a statistical unit. So long as Bert Jones across the street
is still at work, Alf Smith is bound to feel himself dishonoured and a
failure. Hence that frightful feeling of impotence and despair which is
almost the worst evil of unemployment—far worse than any hardship,
worse than the demoralisation of enforced idleness, and only less bad
than the physical degeneracy of Alf Smith's children, born on the PAC.
Everyone who saw Greenwood's play _Love on the Dole_ must remember that
dreadful moment when the poor, good, stupid working man beats on the
table and cries out, 'O God, send me some work!' This was not dramatic
exaggeration, it was a touch from life. That cry must have been uttered,
in almost those words, in tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of
thousands of English homes, during the past fifteen years.

[¶19] But, I think not again—or at least, not so often. That is the real
point: people are ceasing to kick against the pricks. After all, even
the middle classes—yes, even the bridge clubs in the country towns—are
beginning to realise that there is such a thing as unemployment. The 'My
dear, I don't _believe_ in all this nonsense about unemployment. Why,
only last week we wanted a man to weed the garden, and we simply
couldn't get one. They don't _want_ to work, that's all it is!' which
you heard at every decent tea-table five years ago, is growing
perceptibly less frequent. As for the working class themselves, they
have gained immensely in economic knowledge. I believe that the _Daily
Worker_ has accomplished a great deal here: its influence is out of all
proportion to its circulation. But in any case they have had their
lesson well rubbed into them, not only because unemployment is so
widespread but because it has lasted so long. When people live on the
dole for years at a time they grow used to it, and drawing the dole,
though it remains unpleasant, ceases to be shameful. Thus the old,
independent, workhouse-fearing tradition is undermined, just as the
ancient fear of debt is undermined by the hire-purchase system. In the
back-streets of Wigan and Barnsley I saw every kind of privation, but I
probably saw much less _conscious_ misery than I should have seen ten
years ago. The people have at any rate grasped that unemployment is a
thing they cannot help. It is not only Alf Smith who is out of work now;
Bert Jones is out of work as well, and both of them have been 'out' for
years. It makes a great deal of difference when things are the same for
everybody.

[¶20] So you have whole populations settling down, as it were, to a lifetime
on the PAC. And what I think is admirable, perhaps even hopeful, is that
they have managed to do it without going spiritually to pieces. A
working man does not disintegrate under the strain of poverty as a
middle-class person does. Take, for instance, the fact that the working
class think nothing of getting married on the dole. It annoys the old
ladies in Brighton, but it is a proof of their essential good sense;
they realise that losing your job does not mean that you cease to be a
human being. So that in one way things in the distressed areas are not
so bad as they might be. Life is still fairly normal, more normal than
one really has the right to expect. Families are impoverished, but the
family-system has not broken up. The people are in effect living a
reduced version of their former lives. Instead of raging against their
destiny they have made things tolerable by lowering their standards.

[¶21] But they don't necessarily lower their standards by cutting out luxuries
and concentrating on necessities; more often it is the other way
about—the more natural way, if you come to think of it. Hence the fact
that in a decade of unparalleled depression, the consumption of all
cheap luxuries has increased. The two things that have probably made the
greatest difference of all are the movies and the mass-production of
cheap smart clothes since the war. The youth who leaves school at
fourteen and gets a blind-alley job is out of work at twenty, probably
for life; but for two pounds ten on the hire-purchase system he can buy
himself a suit which, for a little while and at a little distance, looks
as though it had been tailored in Savile Row. The girl can look like a
fashion plate at an even lower price. You may have three halfpence in
your pocket and not a prospect in the world, and only the corner of a
leaky bedroom to go home to; but in your new clothes you can stand on
the street corner, indulging in a private daydream of yourself as Clark
Gable or Greta Garbo, which compensates you for a great deal. And even
at home there is generally a cup of tea going—a 'nice cup of tea'—and
Father, who has been out of work since 1929, is temporarily happy
because he has a sure tip for the Cesarewitch.

[¶22] Trade since the war has had to adjust itself to meet the demands of
underpaid, underfed people, with the result that a luxury is nowadays
almost always cheaper than a necessity. One pair of plain solid shoes
costs as much as two ultra-smart pairs. For the price of one square meal
you can get two pounds of cheap sweets. You can't get much meat for
threepence, but you can get a lot of fish and chips. Milk costs
threepence a pint and even 'mild' beer costs fourpence, but aspirins are
seven a penny and you can wring forty cups of tea out of a quarter-pound
packet. And above all there is gambling, the cheapest of all luxuries.
Even people on the verge of starvation can buy a few days' hope
('Something to live for', as they call it) by having a penny on a
sweepstake. Organised gambling has now risen almost to the status of a
major industry. Consider, for instance, a phenomenon like the Football
Pools, with a turnover of about six million pounds a year, almost all of
it from the pockets of working-class people. I happened to be in
Yorkshire when Hitler re-occupied the Rhineland. Hitler, Locarno,
Fascism and the threat of war aroused hardly a flicker of interest
locally, but the decision of the Football Association to stop publishing
their fixtures in advance (this was an attempt to quell the Football
Pools) flung all Yorkshire into a storm of fury. And then there is the
queer spectacle of modern electrical science showering miracles upon
people with empty bellies. You may shiver all night for lack of
bedclothes, but in the morning you can go to the public library and read
the news that has been telegraphed for your benefit from San Francisco
and Singapore. Twenty million people are underfed but literally everyone
in England has access to a radio. What we have lost in food we have
gained in electricity. Whole sections of the working class who have been
plundered of all they really need are being compensated, in part, by
cheap luxuries which mitigate the surface of life.

[¶23] Do you consider all this desirable? No, I don't. But it may be that the
psychological adjustment which the working class are visibly making is
the best they could make in the circumstances. They have neither turned
revolutionary nor lost their self-respect; merely they have kept their
tempers and settled down to make the best of things on a fish-and-chip
standard. The alternative would be God knows what continued agonies of
despair; or it might be attempted insurrections which, in a strongly
governed country like England, could only lead to futile massacres and a
régime of savage repression.

[¶24] Of course the post-war development of cheap luxuries has been a very
fortunate thing for our rulers. It is quite likely that fish and chips,
art-silk stockings, tinned salmon, cut-price chocolate (five two-ounce
bars for sixpence), the movies, the radio, strong tea and the Football
Pools have between them averted revolution. Therefore we are sometimes
told that the whole thing is an astute manoeuvre by the governing
class—a sort of 'bread and circuses' business—to hold the unemployed
down. What I have seen of our governing class does not convince me that
they have that much intelligence. The thing has happened, but by an
unconscious process—the quite natural interaction between the
manufacturer's need for a market and the need of half-starved people for
cheap palliatives.

[¶25] -----

[¶26] [1] For instance, a recent census of the Lancashire cotton mills
revealed the fact that over 40,000 _full-time_ employees receive less
than thirty shillings a week each. In Preston, to take only one town,
the number receiving _over_ thirty shillings a week was 640 and the
number receiving _under_ thirty shillings was 3,113.