I am old enough to remember the last slump — I was three in 1932 and lived in the Potteries in North Staffordshire, always a precarious area economically, and badly hit by slack trade. Most of the workers in the pot bank were women and girls, traditionally paid low wages, and now subjected to pay cuts. The men worked in the pits, if they were lucky. My mother, who came from Lancashire, and had a song for everything, used to sing:
Colliery lads make gold and silver.
Factory lads make brass.
Who would marry a hand-loom weaver,
When there’s plenty of colliery lads?
In the wasteland not far from our house, there were curious piles of stones and boulders, making a lunar landscape. They had been put there to make the roads for a big new housing-estate, planned in the prosperous 1920s, now abandoned.
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