The Ministry

The campus in this photograph became the main offices for a British government ministry in 1948. You could be forgiven for wondering if it was a prisoner-of-war camp, repurposed as The Ministry of Truth, The Ministry of Plenty, or The Ministry of Peace.

The campus was originally built as a wartime hospital for wounded servicemen in Newcastle upon Tyne, England, my home town. It’s widely reported that voluntary German prisoner of war labor may have been used, but I’m inclined to disbelieve that. There were only a few German POWs in the UK until after the invasion of France in June 1944((Temporary Settlements and Transient Populations the Legacy of Britain’s Prisoner of War Camps: 1940–1948, J. Anthony Hellen, Erdkunde, Jul. – Sep., 1999, pp. 191-219.)).

Fortunately, the hospital was never needed. In post-war Britain the campus found a purpose that would provide a financial safety net for millions of families, and stable employment for thousands. My connection with these buildings is positive and visceral.

Basic human dignity

My father worked for 25 years at the Central Offices of The Ministry of National Insurance in those temporary buildings pictured at the top of this post.

This office has three main functions: (1) it keeps a ledger record of the contributions and benefits of the 25,000,000 insured persons in the United Kingdom; (2) it supplies information to local National Insurance offices and local offices of the Ministry of Labour and National Service throughout Great Britain; and (3) it pays most of the long-term benefits under the National Insurance scheme, principally pensions and allowances under the Family Allowances scheme.

((Ministry of National Insurance: Central Offices, Newcastle-on-Tyne, R. Mendelsohn, Social Service Review – Vol 25, No 2, pp. 210–216.))

The Family Allowances Branch, where my dad worked, put bread on the table of nearly every family with two or more children in the United Kingdom.

After the deprivations of war, the British public was ready for payback. They did not want to go back to a pre-war world where church ladies would descend upon their homes to determine if they were the worthy poor, deserving of hand-me-downs.

The Family Allowances scheme was an early example of an element of a universal basic income. Every family with two or more children received a weekly stipend, based on the number of children. I was the second child when I was born in 1951, making us eligible for a book of coupons to be exchanged for cash each week at the post office. Five shillings a week (about $12 in 2021 dollars) was not lavish, but it made a difference for many families living on the edge.

For 25 years, my dad walked over each workday to The Ministry, barely missing a day through ill health.

Much of the work at The Ministry in the 1950’s must have been soul-crushing.

The alphabetical index system … houses 30,000,000 slips in 75,000 binders; each clerk has 100,000 slips under his control. There are 489,500 “Smiths” in the index, including 9,000 plain “John Smiths.” There are also 190,000 “Browns,” 96,000 “Clarks,” 88,000 “Clarkes,” 166,000 “Davieses,” 363,000 “Joneses,” 824,500 “Mac’s,” and 200,000 “Williamses.” As there are cross-references for hyphenated names, etc., there are more index slips than there are insurance records.

…

Something of the nature of a production line is used for routing all material. It enters at one end of the line, is sorted by “post inwards,” and is dispatched by means of a pneumatic-tube system to the appropriate ledger section or to the index section. From “post in” to the final dispatch point at “post out” a carrier travels half a mile. Wherever possible, mechanical or semi-mechanical sorting devices are used, but it is found that many of the processes may not be performed mechanically, and much handwork and a great deal of work involving the application of intelligence remain to be done.

((Ibid.))

My dad initially had a junior, clerical role, but he escaped much of the more repetitive work. Being a man apparently helped.

There are certain difficult staffing problems that arise from an enterprise of this character; the constant repetitive processes of a semiskilled nature seem to be rather deadening and could hardly be supported by an imaginative person for many years. The bulk of the operatives are girls, who may expect to marry. The authorities are fully aware of the difficulty and attempt to make life as pleasant as possible by means of a great range of recreational activity, and good hostels are provided. At present the general feeling is good, possibly because many of the employees have, in this formerly poverty-stricken area, a lively remembrance of unemployment and bad industrial conditions; but the work requires just sufficient concentration to prevent such compensations of factory life as singing or conversation, yet does not offer sufficient interest to make it appear worthwhile in itself. In addition, there is no end product, such as that created by the factory, in which the individual can take pride.

((Ibid.))

A roof over our heads

My dad started working at The Ministry in the late 1940’s. The job made the family eligible for public housing, a major incentive at a time when housing was in short supply in the UK.

My family was allocated a prefabricated house, shipped from the United States as a temporary replacement for housing destroyed in the wartime Blitz. My parents were grateful to have a comfortable, intact place to live.

But my family did not live there long. My arrival in 1951 made us eligible for something more substantial. A new public housing project was being built near The Ministry, and my parents were able to snag one of the new council houses because they now had a second child.

The photo at the top of this post shows what would become The Ministry. A field, at the very top left of the photo would become Fairways Estate, the public housing project where I lived throughout my childhood, and my parents lived until they moved, one-at-a-time, to assisted living in the 1990’s.

Things we do together

My childhood would have been very different without my dad’s stable government job and government programs. We benefitted from the newly created National Health Service, subsidized public housing, and elements of a universal basic income. I started my working life with a good education and no debt. My dad retired in the early 1970’s with a reliable pension and a lump sum that made it possible to buy our house from the city.

Over the decades that followed, too many voters have wanted to kick away the ladder that brought them up and out of poverty. Combined with globalization, the consequence, particularly in the USA, has been an increasing gap between the haves and have-nots.