- Written by Mike Morris
Module Three - Workshop Three
On The Parish. 1934 – 1937. The Writer as Historian and Dramatist.
Christopher Hilliard: To Exercise Our Talents, P.105
In introducing this, the eleventh workshop of the George Garrett Archive course, Tony Wailey, in situating and contextualising George Garrett and his work, opened by reflecting back on the previous workshop where we discussed the great slump, the great depression and the 1929 crash. Because of the level of need displayed through mass unemployment, and as a results of the protests against both that and the poor levels of maintenance generally provided by the poor-law parish guardians, there was more state assistance available to the unemployed. But, the sheer length of the recession and the recession meant that a whole generation had grown up with mass unemployment as a permanent feature of their life. For many, Garrett included, ten years could pass with little more than a week or two of casual work to be had. As an interesting contrast to this back ground, Tony quoted from Eric Hobsbawm’s ‘Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century. 1914-1991’: