HOMECROFTING COMES OF AGE
[To the Editor of TIIE SPECTATOR.] SIR,—You laid your finger with admirable exactness on the outstanding feature of the Distressed Areas Reports when you said that they were dull. But I _wonder if you quite got the reason. Was it really that there were no new facts about unemployment ; or only the old trouble that a fact, especially a new one, is somehow blunt at the point and Won't go through to a Commissioner ? I had unite a pretty bunch of them in my quiver, when Sir Wyndham Portal came to Cardiff, all ready for hint and all new—at least to Government Reports. A little epic I could have told him, about a real experiment sponsored by The Spectator in 1936 ;- about the groping which followed ; about the long assiduous research and its striking result, the evolution of a new technique for enabling groups of unemployed men to raise their standard of life by the simple device of working for one another. But the aim was bad ; my shots all fell wide ; and my -Commissioner escaped !
But natural grief that no glimmer of the Homecroft light upon Sir Wyndham's problem was destined to illumine the unimaginative pages of his report has just been turned to joy -by a shock from an unexpected quarter ; and I am cheered' by no less an event than a gift of £30,000—not to the Homecroft movement, but to the cause of self-subsistence for the unemployed, by a believer in- it.
One hardly knows on what to congratulate Lord Nuffield most ; the heroic scale of his giving, or his exquisite placing of the gift. His money has gone to do something different from what such gifts almost ever do. It has gone, Sir, to make a little history. This is not because the donor has placed it in the hands of a social worker of genius like Mr. Peter Scott ; and I hope my remark will not embarrass him. It is because Mr. Scott and his friends have turned their genius to a thing that will really do. The unem- ployed at Upholland are making for themselves the necessities of life and exchanging them on a basis of the amount of work put in. Already, it is reported, their standard of life has risen by about 10s. to Lis. per week.
Lord Nuffield's gift will have reverberations everywhere., It is the coming of age of a new principle in the treatment of unemployment. All the serious agencies now at work will have to come to it. Largesse simply cannot go on for ever. The public will tire of merely amusing the unem- ployed. They themselves will tire of being amused—or even educated. They want to get economically on to their feet. Wages for all are not going to return. And only the possibility of getting along without them will really stir their. blood.
There are the most convincing signs that it can be done.. The hope lies in throwing them into a new economic forma- tion based on the triple idea of a limited group, a common• pool, and exchange. The key to the process is the exchanging. I have not heard whether the Upholland Scheme has in. any degree adopted the Homecroft technique for doing this. In any case, such a technique exists. It really amounts to an ad hoc currency. Unemployment centres everywhere. can. obtain a full statement of it for a merely nominal charge to cover typing costs. May I take this opportunity of earnestly inviting them to do so ? It is to be had from the National Homecroft Association, Ltd., 88 Charles Street., Cardiff, and is entitled " How to Start a Homecrofting Group." I plead for close, sympathetic, persevering study of the practical suggestions there set forth. There is no reason why either the Homecroft Association or the Upholland Settlement should work alone in this new endeavour, or why a great nation-wide series of experiments should not be simul taneously seeking, each on its own lines, to make effective the simple principle of allowing wage-earning men when wages fail to turn round and make their own things.—
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