1. Exactly how Keynes defined saving and investment at this time, so that he could claim that they were not necessarily equal, was a topic for much dispute among economists. The salient point is that by investment, as he told the Macmillan Committee, he meant ‘bricks and mortar’; and I use the term in this sense, to cover all investment in new plant or infrastructure.
1. For women the picture is not so clear. The number of insured men continued to rise every year during the slump from just under 9 million in 1930 to 9.5 million in 1935; but the number of insured women, which peaked at 3.58 million in 1931, declined slightly to 3.53 million by 1935. Women were thus a quarter of the insured workforce and accounted for 25 per cent of those registered unemployed in 1930. But by 1932 only 12 per cent of the registered unemployed were women. This was mainly an effect of the Anomalies Act, passed in the dying weeks of the Labour Government in 1931, in tightening the conditions under which married women could claim benefit. Thus women who would have been willing to work were being pushed off the register. The official figures, which overstate men’s unemployment, to this extent understate women’s unemployment.
1. Despite the traditional Scottish legal custom permitting couples to declare themselves married before a witness, such as, notoriously, the Blacksmith at Gretna Green, just across the border from England. The Scottish series of statistics is complicated by the fact that the Church of Scotland and the United Free Church reunited in 1929.
1. Not, perhaps, the best moment to provoke a crisis in Commonwealth relations; yet this is what the English cricket team did during their 1932–3 tour of Australia. Failing to check the prodigious career of Donald Bradman, Australia’s leading batsman, by ordinary means, the English fast-bowlers were instructed to use ‘body line’ – a tactic which duly succeeded in winning the Ashes (appropriately named in this instance).