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It is perhaps well to consider here the background into which bowls, a leisure activity, fitted. Industry in its heaviest form, gave employment to the bulk of the County Durham population. Fundamentally, shipbuilding, iron and coalmining and the manufacture of mining machinery provided the backbone of the county's economic resources. The contribution made to Britain's war effort by the worthies of County Durham during six years of toil and sweat was magnificent. The work of these men, both by hand and by brain, did much to keep this country equipped with the sinews of war. This fact is all the more surprising when it is remembered what a load of bitterness these same miners and shipbuilders carried with them, almost up to the outbreak of hostilities.
No county in England was worse hit by the depression that began about 1930. Nobody who would understand County Durham today can do so unless he understands exactly what those years of depression meant to the industrial areas. This luckless area, unplanned, unlovely, without character, form or civic integration, a sordid product of one of the meanest and most grasping ages in all history, nevertheless supported a population on whose labours a large part of the wealth of England had been founded. To it, in the 1930's came unparalleled economic catastrophe.
It is not my task here to describe in detail this awful disaster, but it has so seared the life of County Durham that it cannot be altogether omitted. I must, therefore give three instances of what the depression meant to this area. "Witton Park and Woodside. Total population two thousand six hundred. Six hundred and seventy persons, or practically every soul available for work, is on the live register, and nearly half of them drawing neither Unemployment Benefit nor Transitional Payments" (i.e. having outrun qualification for them by reason of long unemployment).
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