Wal's Work

A chubby mechanic named Walter ("Wal") Hannington was so useful to the British Government as a highly-skilled armaments tooler in 1914 that he was exempted from active army duty. It would have saved His Majesty's Government a pack of trouble in the past 20 years if Wal had gone to France and stopped a German bullet.

On November 11, 1918, the War ended but Wal was just beginning. He celebrated

Armistice Day by hoisting a red flag atop his factory. Later, in the huge Government motor transport depot at Slough known as The White Elephant, he headed the workers' ironbound union. The Government dared not fire him for fear of arousing his followers. Solution: they sacked the whole kit & boodle--7,800 workingmen--just to get rid of Wal. Whereupon Wal dressed them all up as clergymen in surplices and paraded them through the grounds before a huge white cloth elephant, which they pompously mourned as dead.

That incident made Wal's reputation as an underdog leader and Government headache. Ever since then he has been employed by the unemployed. In 1921 he became head of the National Unemployed Workers' Movement, which by last week had accumulated 180,000 members who pay a penny a week dues if they can afford it, and who pay Wal less than $25 a week to keep the Government in a frenzy. He has earned his pay and then some, particularly this winter when, according to last week's figure, the British unemployment total reached a three-year high.

Shortly before Christmas, Wal sent several hundred unemployed out into London's Oxford Circus to dramatize their appeals for employment on public works and an increase in winter relief allowances. Suddenly tossing themselves on the ground like so many Holy Rollers, they tangled traffic into an unholy mess. Two days later he sent some of his roughest members into one of London's smoothest spots, the Ritz. He almost got a coffined umbrella labeled HE DID NOT GET WINTER RELIEF into No. 10 Downing Street.

Last week Wal sent his cohorts into a dinner of the precious Wine and Food Society where, as Wal says, "a bunch of gourmets were holding a bloody gorge." Banners accused: YOU FEAST WHILE WE STARVE. At a banquet at which Minister of Health Walter E. Elliot was-speaking on leisure, Wal's men appeared with signs reading: LEISURE IS NO PLEASURE. They crowded into a white-tie feast attended by Civilian Defense Chief Sir John Anderson, flopped in the foyer like defenseless citizens in an air raid, and shouted for work on air raid precautions projects.

After all this the Government got to doing some extra heavy thinking about the growing pains of unemployment. And rightly, too--Wal's standing army (180,000 NUWMers) compared not unfavorably with Britain's Regular Army (about 220,000), and his potential army (2,039,026 unemployed according to latest count) was more than three times as big as Britain's total present army strength, Territorials, Reserves and all.

Appeasement, obviously, was in order. Prime Minister Chamberlain, the Great Appeaser, deciding it might be a good idea to have a heart-to-heart chat with the real article, imported two burly miners named Scaife and Spouge from Yorkshire. As soon as they reached London, Scaife and Spouge made a beeline for Madame Tussaud's waxworks to get used to rubbing elbows with the great. At No. 10 Downing Street that afternoon they rubbed elbows with 400 non-waxwork lords, ladies, ministers, M.P.s. Scaife told the Prime Minister that before he left home his granddaughter had asked: "Will Hitler be there too?" The Great Appeaser had a good laugh over that one.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.