Margaret Mills was born hours before ‘Black Thursday’ – a day which launched the Great Depression in 1929. Her parents took photographs of their beaming new cherub, and you can see them in Margaret’s memoir Anecdotage, published last week.
Although Margaret moved to Waiheke in the 1970s, she was born in Taranaki. Her father was a schoolteacher and a member of the early Labour Party, and one of his friends was a rising political star called Michael Joseph Savage.
By the 1935 general election, the economy was in crisis. Alarmed by Labour’s popularity, a coalition government and entrenched interests fought back with rabid ads and editorials. Days before the election, a popular leftie broadcaster even had his show jammed by the Post Office.
The Mills family had moved to Marton, a town on a railway junction connecting the North Island Main Trunk Line with the Marton-New Plymouth Line.
This made their house a useful crash pad for those on the campaign trail. ‘Joe’ Savage, Bob Semple and Walter Nash would arrive on the late train and leave on the red-eye. Two of these house guests would later become prime ministers; Savage in 1935, and Nash in 1957.
The election of the first Labour government was a seismic event in New Zealand history. Although only a child, Margaret remembers the evening of 27 November 1935 in vivid detail.
“I can still feel the excitement. The room was full of it and murky with tobacco smoke. Newspapers with charts were spread out on any available surface and the spluttering little radio was doing its best in the middle of the kitchen table.
“A keg of beer was on the veranda. They agreed not to start drinking until after we won. Those who had charts equipped themselves with blue and red pencils and pencil sharpeners.
“As soon as a ‘progressive’ result was marked red, cheering broke out. As the pages grew redder, the cheering grew louder. When a ‘final’ was announced, everyone jumped and clapped. When it became obvious we had won, the eating and drinking began. Although as excited as everyone else, I was packed off to bed without a story.”
The party went on to win the next three elections. When Savage died in 1940 he was wildly popular and given a State Funeral. Margaret was one of thousands to pay their respects as his funeral train chugged somberly up the Main Trunk Line.
A few days ago, over a copy of Margaret’s memoir, I told a young bright spark that the author had seen the birth of the welfare state.
“Was that a good thing?” she asked.
It’s a good question, although I wonder what someone born in 1900 would make of it.
In the years before Margaret was born, the headline ‘Death from Want’ was not uncommon. Here’s an example from June 1892: “Yesterday [in Christchurch] a respectable woman called Elizabeth Harvey died at the cottage of a poor woman who took her in. The deceased had been unable to do much work for twelve months. A doctor certified that death resulted from exhaustion produced by want, expatiated by bronchitis.”
‘Want’ is the old-fashioned word for starvation.
In those days, a worker’s wage was nowhere near enough to save for retirement. By the turn of the century public outrage led to a couple of grudging government measures: a means-tested old-age pension and a benefit for ‘deserving widows’ (Māori received 25 percent less than the full rate). When the unemployment benefit was introduced in 1930, it was for pākehā men only. Even as unemployment soared, the coalition government believed that paying the jobless without making them work was morally wrong.
The first Labour government’s reforms changed all of this. They bought in the forty-hour week, a public works programme and a Department of Housing Construction which trained skilled workers to build state houses to ease the housing crisis.
These policies did not cause the sky to fall in.
“I grew up in a world,” writes Margaret, “where medical care was free and doctors made house calls. Homes were provided for civil servants, including teachers, nurses, police and workers on the railways, rented out at the same rate as state houses. Many government employees didn’t own houses until they retired. The money borrowed to pay for these great improvements in people’s wellbeing was paid for by a huge leap in productivity. Tertiary education was free, and the poor parents of clever children, for the first time, could expect to see them go to university.”
The welfare state has been eroded, most dramatically by the fourth Labour government. But for years these reforms helped taxpayers stay healthy and housed. Which helped them, of course, to pay taxes.
There are few who remember a world before social welfare. One of them was six years old on 26 November 1935, the night she was sent to bed without a story.
“‘Don’t be silly,’ Margaret’s father told her. ‘Tonight you’ve seen history made. Try to make it into a story.’ He forgot to kiss me goodnight,” wrote Margaret. “Then I understood how important it really was.”
• Jenny Nichols
