Love On The Dole.

Deborah Kerr.

Because of spending most of yesterday in bed I was wide awake at midnight. Flicking around the channels for something worth watching I stumbled across an old black and white film that I enjoyed immensely called Love On The Dole, a British film made in 1941. It was based on a novel of the same name by Walter Greenwood. Set in Salford during the depression of the 1930s it portrays the poverty that people lived in, even when they had jobs, and things got even worse with unemployment. Unemployment benefits were cut even more by being means tested. People were at the mercy of pawnbrokers and other unscrupulous characters.

The only name I recognised in the credits was Deborah Kerr who was only nineteen when she played the lead role of Sally. I thought she was brilliant and for a Scottish actress her Lancashire accent was perfect. When her fiancée is killed during a demonstration, she falls into the hands of a local bookie to save her family from destitution. There is some humour to lighten the depressing story, which is provided by a coven of old ladies who meet up to drink gin, hold seances, and read tea leaves. One of them was Irish, I am always curious about the Irish, so I looked her up on Wikipedia to find out more. The actress’s name was Maire O’Neill and her story I found fascinating. She was born in 1886 and has a place in theatre history because in 1907 at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin she was the first person to play the role of Pegeen Mike Flaherty in John Millington Synge’s masterpiece The Playboy of the Western World. She was engaged to Synge, but tragically he died of cancer in 1909 before they could wed. Synge wrote the plays The Playboy of the Western World and Deirdre of the Sorrows for her. She appeared in many films up to 1953 including Alfred Hitchcock's film version of Seán O'Casey's play Juno and the Paycock.

Maire O'Neill.

I will not tell you any more about the film in case you want to watch it yourself. It was not only the north of England that was grim in the 1930s, but it was also all over the world. The problem of unemployment was solved by organising the second World War. I think, by writing Love On The Dole the author Walter Greenwood who himself left school at age 13, was appealing for a better, fairer world when the war was over. I think it is no surprise that the people rejected the past in the election of 1944 and the Labour government had a landslide victory and established the NHS, the Welfare State, equal education opportunities and housing fit for people to live in. I am sure this film played some part in that.

I would like to end by wishing a very happy 89^th birthday to Dennis Skinner, one of the few politicians left in Britain with any integrity.

Dennis Skinner.