Too poor to turn down work (From The Northern Echo)

Too poor to turn down work

11:58am Wednesday 1st February 2012 in Harry Mead By Harry Mead, Columnist

WELFARE reform is just about top of the present Government’s domestic agenda.

Most people probably agree that the benefits culture has got out of hand. While state support is vital for those in need, the Byzantine growth of benefits has spawned a class of claimant content to live off the state, which means its working people.

Parallel with this is a belief that before the cushion of state aid became available, people would do any kind of work rather than be idle. But was this ever so?

From an essay by Richard Jefferies, the great 19th Century writer on the countryside its natural history and its social conditions I’ve just learned that in his day (1848 to 1887) it was common for people in severe poverty to refuse work they felt did not suit them.

For instance, a wealthy woman newly arrived in a village wanted a boy to wheel her around in her bathchair.

Jeffferies reports: “Instead of having to choose between half a dozen applicants, as she expected, the difficulty was to discover anybody who would consider such a job. Nobody was eager for any extra shilling that could be earned that way.”

He further reveals: “A man was offered hop pole shaving at 3s a hundred, a fair price, but the work did not please him, and he would not do it. Another man stood idling at the village crossroads for weeks, hands in pockets, waiting for work.

“Someone said he could dig an acre of grassland to make a market garden, at 15s a week, with a spade.

“He went, but presently returned to say he did not care about it.

“In some way or other, it did not fall in with his notions of what work for him ought to be.”

Jefferies comments: “No one can explain these things.” But he then draws an enlightening distinction.

While “work for the cottager must be work to please him,” “in London the least trifle is snapped up immediately, and there is a great crush and press for permission to earn a penny and that in not very dignified ways”.

So the Jarrow marchers probably would have taken anything.

And, the unsung opposites of those prepared to live off the state, there are no doubt many people, once employed in jobs that gave them satisfaction as well as money, who have taken work far from their taste.

NEXT week brings the 60th anniversary of the Queen’s accession to the throne.

A detail in the report of her father’s death, which you might have read in the recent facsimile front page of The Northern Echo, was that just two days before he died, the King, George VI, was out hare-shooting.”

A member of his party said: “The King was on the top of his form. I saw him shoot nine hares.”

I think we’ve seen the last of hare-shooting monarchs, don’t you?

Sometimes things really do change for the better.

HAVE you noticed how summits of world leaders are nearly always held in resorts?

A cynic might say that if the latest World Economic Forum had taken place in Daventry instead of Davos, the Swiss ski resort, fewer people, perhaps including the no-longer-in-office Lord Mandelson and former Chancellor Alistair Darling, would have felt it necessary to attend, and the business would have been concluded much faster.