By Dr Ashley Borrett
During economic downturns and cost of living crises, when money is tight and families are struggling to pay the bills, fears that some people resort to crime to make ends meet often become part of local and national crime narratives.
Governments, local authorities, the police, the press and the public, to varying degrees, often believe that an increase in certain crimes, such as burglary, theft and shoplifting, are an obvious and unavoidable consequence of poverty and desperation.
This has certainly been the case during the recent cost of living crisis that has affected most parts of the country. But during the last century, there was another major economic factor that consistently haunted governments, law enforcement agencies and the public in modern industrial Britain: unemployment. Unemployment leads to poverty, and poverty leads to crime, so the thinking goes. Desperate times calling for desperate measures.
It was a key feature of a period of British history that experienced one of the most intense economic crises to have ever hit the country – the years between the two world wars.
Capitalism in crisis
The interwar period has sometimes been characterised as one of capitalism in crisis. Unemployment levels remained high throughout the period, with an average of just over 14% of the insured workforce without a job.[1] Up until around 1935, the national unemployed figure stood at more than 2 million.
In towns and cities across the country, 15% to 20% of the working-class population were living below subsistence level.[2] For many, the fall in living standards was a direct consequence of unemployment, and throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the Home Office and politicians of all political persuasions saw a direct correlation between poverty and certain types of crime. For them it seemed like common sense to view criminality as an obvious bedfellow of destitution.
Close connections
The number of indictable offences known to the police, which included crimes such as burglary, housebreaking and larceny (theft), rose throughout the interwar years, with a notable increase during the 1930s. An examination of the crime statistics for the period between 1929 and 1932, which saw unemployment levels reach their peak, reveals that rates of serious property crime doubled between these years.[3]
In a House of Commons debate in 1932, Labour MP David Grenfell stated that he felt ‘most reformers have been convinced for a long time that there was a connection between poverty and unemployment and crime’.
The Home Secretary, Sir Herbert Samuel, echoed this view during the same debate when he attributed increases in crime to the ‘extreme’ economic conditions that the country and its population were facing, exemplified by the increasing number of thefts in the more depressed areas of the country.
It appears that some members of the second chamber took a similar view. Citing experts in such matters, the Lord Bishop of Southwark declared that ‘those who are most competent to know the facts of the case assure us that there is a very close connection between unemployment and crime’.
In the introduction to the 1923 Report of the Commissioners of Prisons, it was accepted that unemployment was ‘one of the chief contributory factors to the prison population of to-day’, believing that longer-term unemployment further increased the chances of being committed to prison. The following year’s prison report reiterated this view.
The ‘central domestic issue’ of the day
It is not surprising then, that the manifestos of the main political parties during the interwar years regularly featured policies and promises designed at relieving the problems of unemployment.
As early as 1923, the Conservative manifesto had called for ‘drastic measures’ and an ‘urgent solution’ to deal with the problem of unemployment and underemployment.[4] A year later and the unemployment situation was, believed the Conservatives, ‘as grave, if not graver’.[5]
The other parties agreed. The Liberal manifesto of 1929 believed that unemployment remained the ‘central domestic issue which confronts us’.[6] At the 1935 election, Labour’s manifesto proclaimed that the country faced the ‘grim spectacle of two million workless with an army of well over a million and a half people on the Poor Law’.[7]
Northern exposure
If there was a link between unemployment, poverty and crime then it was clear that it would be in the towns and cities suffering the most from the prevailing economic conditions that the problem would be most apparent, such as the industrial areas of the north of England.
In the depression-hit districts of Teesside for instance, the adverse impact of a disintegrating economy on regional crime levels was a serious concern for local officials.[8] It was a theme that featured in the local press, and the possible links between poverty and crime were taken seriously by those charged with dealing with crime, including the Chief Constable of Middlesbrough police.[9]
Reports from the local Quarter Sessions and police courts of Sheffield in this period suggest that there was a general acceptance of a link between unemployment and crime.[10] And in Hull, the local police chief constable believed in the causal relationship between the lack of work and criminal activity, although temptation through idleness and inactivity, alongside poverty and destitution, were also believed to be key drivers.
Mitigating factors
The Lady Mayoress of Hull appeared keen to point out that ‘great poverty’ was responsible for a large proportion of the crime being committed in the city during this period. And letters to the local newspaper, the Hull Daily Mail, also pressed the point of the damaging relationship between poverty and crime.
The problems of crime north of the border also led many to believe that unemployment and poverty were to blame. In the annual report of H. M. Constabularies in February 1933, Lieutenant-Colonel W. D. Allen, an Inspector of Constabulary for Scotland, believed that it was ‘unemployment and its consequent results’ that was largely responsible for increases in crimes, particularly those against property.
Police officers often highlighted the link between poverty and crime during local court cases, where defendants would also use destitution as a mitigating factor for their criminal activities. For example, the police officer giving evidence during the case of a 60-year-old Hull resident of Hull, who was charged with stealing four iron axle boxes from the yard of LNER, knew that he had been unemployed for a number of years and had previous convictions and was in no doubt that his downfall was due entirely to unemployment.
Statistical uncertainties
Official crime statistics can be a notoriously bad indicator of actual crime levels and the reasons why certain individuals are drawn to criminality are complex and coloured by all sorts of social, economic and geographical influences.
There is little doubt that crime increased during the interwar period, particularly in areas such as robbery, motor offences and simple thefts. But the total may have been relatively small, perhaps between 5% and 7% for the whole period.
And while it was accepted that a fall in living standards caused by a period of unemployment could precipitate certain levels of criminal behaviour, there wasn’t always a clear and obvious correlation between crime levels and unemployment. Moreover, a return to relative prosperity wasn’t automatically accompanied by a reduction in criminality across the disparate towns and cities of the UK.
Challenging the common sense view
Not all politicians, police chiefs and court officials believed that poverty led directly to crime. Long-serving Hull stipendiary magistrate, Mr J. R. Macdonald, was quick to challenge a newspaper report that had misquoted a comment he made about the unemployed and crime.
The Hull Daily Mail had reported him as saying that the unemployed were ‘driven’ to crime, when what he actually claimed to have said was that they were ‘hard driven’ and not necessarily more inclined to criminal behaviour. ‘In spite of the hardness under which the men of the country are being driven, they are keeping honest, admirably honest, and it is something to be proud of. They are hard driven, but they resist going into crime,’ he said.
The governor of Hull Prison even claimed that the prison population got smaller during periods when unemployment was at its highest, albeit without recourse to any statistical evidence.
During a parliamentary debate on the issue of unemployment in 1932, Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Vivian Henderson declared that it was ‘quite untrue’ and also ‘grossly unfair to the unemployed themselves to suggest that, because there is more unemployment, there is necessarily bound to be more crime’.
A popular narrative
It would be fair to say, however, that the ‘poverty leads to crime’ narrative held fast for much of the interwar period. For many, it seemed plainly obvious that the working and lower classes would turn to crime to feed their families in what was one of the most severe economic crises the country had ever experienced.
It was a view that predated the interwar years and one that no doubt will continue to resurface during periods when large sections of the population are staring poverty and destitution in the face.
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Key primary sources used for this article include House of Commons debates, available via Hansard; annual crime statistics and prison commissioners reports, which can be accessed at UK Parliamentary Papers; and the Hull Daily Mail, which is available to view at The British Newspaper Archive.
Notes
[1] K. D. Brown, ‘Industry and services: employment and unemployment’, in C. Wrigley (ed.), A companion to early twentieth-century Britain (Chichester: Blackwell Publishing, 2009), 311.
[2] D. H. Aldcroft, The inter-war economy: Britain, 1919–1939 (London: B. T. Batsford Ltd, 1973), 377.
[3] L. Williams & B. Godfrey, ‘Serious property offending in the twentieth century’, in D. Nash & A. Kilday (eds.), Murder and mayhem: crime in twentieth-century Britain (Palgrave: London, 2018),69.
[4] F. W. S. Craig, British general election manifestos 1918–1966 (Sussex: Political Reference Publications, 1970), 11.
[5] Ibid., 29.
[6] Ibid., 61
[7] Ibid., 81.
[8] K. Nicholas, The social effects of unemployment in Teesside (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), 104.
[9] Ibid., 114.
[10] Ibid., 190.