How Severe was the Impact of the Depression on British Society in the 1930's?

However other parts of Britain were suffering just as badly as Jarrow from the same social economic problems. Seebohm Rowntree conducted a survey in York in 1936. He set up an absolute poverty line. He said below which people were not earning enough to lead a normal healthy lifestyle. He found that in 1936 18% of York’s population were below this line.

However things were not as bad as they seemed. Although 18% of the people he surveyed lived in poverty when he conducted the same survey several decades earlier in 1899 he found that 33% of the people he surveyed where in poverty. Source C proves this as although average wages were falling prices were falling even faster people were better off now than they had been although they were getting paid less.

In fact there were areas in Britain that were actually doing well during the depression. Although the areas where the old staple industries had been based where suffering quite badly. The old industries had mainly only been situated in the north and in Wales with a few parts of the midlands and Scotland also having pockets of old industries. Many parts of the southern England did not have many staple industries so when all the old industries where closing down there were not large numbers of unemployed in the south. The areas which relied on the prosperity of the staple industries were suffering while people in the south were not seeing as big a change during the 1930s. The reality was that in 1936 south east London had unemployment of 5.6% on average whereas Wales an important area for the old staple industries had an unemployment rate of nearly 30% on average. Source B on the research sheet also shows leisure opportunities in inter-war Britain where also on the increase showing certain regions where doing well and people could afford to spend money on things like electrical goods, cars, evenings out and sports entertainment, Wembley stadium was celebrating it’s 10th birthday by 1933 at the height of the depression.

This is another reason why the south managed to do quite well during the depression. New industries were taking off in the south as they needed electricity to fuel them not coal. These new industries like the motorcar industry and the electrical goods industry where getting people to keep spending money and in turn this kept people in jobs and so kept the economy on its feet in London and the rest of the south.

But it was not just the region you lived in that affected the impact of the depression on your life people of different social classes wher also affected in very different ways.

John Maynard Keynes is doubtlessly the most important figure in the entire history of economics. He  economics with his classic book,  (1936). This is generally regarded as probably the most influential social science treatise of the 20th Century, in that it quickly and permanently changed the way the world looked at the economy and the role of government in society. No other book, before or since, has had such an impact.