UNPLEASANT CONDITIONS

Evening Post, Volume CXX, Issue 8, 9 July 1935, Page 8

UNPLEASANT CONDITIONS

(To the Editor.)

Sir, —Attention has been drawn in the columns ol "The Post" to the conditions of the Civil Servants who work in the Buckle Street Unemployment Bureau, but what of the sustenance men who are forced, to attend there regularly for their allowance? Their

entrance to the "Black Hole," as the Civil Servants' magazine calls it, is part of a barracks, with a walled yard something like that of a gaol. This leads up to a species of barn decorated with wooden joists, and floored, until the last few days, with the coldest concrete I have ever stood upon, and that for two hours at a time. Here are erected little pens or "races" down which the men are herded, but which change their nature and direction every few weeks. There is not a seat to sit on. Here in all weathers come the sustenance men, to fill in forms, to answer questions, to fill in more forms so that they (the sustenance men) may exist until the next week's forms fall due to be answered. Sometimes for a month they will only have to appear once a week; then a reorganisation demands that they come once each week to sign up and once more to be paid. Or, perhaps, an' entirely new form is issued, which means for a week or two confusion and overcrowding with, instead of a mere twenty minutes' shuffle in a queue, two hours in a crowd of ten score men jammed into a barn, under stairs, or forced out into a drizzling rain with no overcoats, shuffling forward six inches at a time towards one window, then back to the end of another queue to start another shuffle towards another window. This is the existence which slowly breaks down the strongest into a drab nonentity or a vicious case of pathology.—l am, etc., ERIC COOK.