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a soup kitchen in Kent Road, around about 1930.
After the collapse of Wall Street, the repercussions spread all around the world in a matter of months. In Europe, Germany was probably the worst hit, with runaway hyper-inflation, but nowhere escaped the effects of depressed economies and queues of jobless people waiting for just about any vacancy to come up. In Portsmouth, navy cut backs spilled over from the dockyard to the rest of the local economy and only a miserable allocation from the "dole" and the chance to get a free bowl of soup and a couple of slices of bread kept many families from total starvation. Hitler's rise to power in Germany would trigger a new wave of military investment and many naval warships that had been in "mothballs" for years were brought out of retirement and refitted. |
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BLACK HUMOUR IN BLEAK TIMES Being out of work was not an experience restricted to the so-called working class - banks, insurance companies, brokers, accountancy firms and many other white collar professions also felt the pinch. Whether or not the bowler-hat brigade really made use of the various charitable kitchens that sprang up, the prospect certainly offered cartoonists the opportunity to employ black humour. The illustration on the left is probably an American one, but the message would have been the same in any country in the western world, and there were so many other "humorous" takes on the bleak world situation that you could probably fill a large book with them. The caption read: "The food's nothin' extra - but you meet some awful nice people." Presumably the cartoonist was able to hang on to his nice, safe job, or he maybe wouldn't have been quite so quick to see the funny side! |
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