Every week during the 1930s scores of unemployed Welsh coalminers would head for sleeping berths on the London Embankment. George Edwards - a miner from Pontypool who had been blacklisted by the employers for his trade union activities - decided he would have to make his way to Canada if he was to find work
A complex range of factors can lead to people ending up "on the floor" (OTF). More often than not these are structural - the booms and slumps of the capitalist economy - but psychological flaws of character can sometimes play a part as well. The case of the Duke of Bristol who gambled and drank his vast fortune away was a source of endless fascination for the horse race betters who assembled on Saturday mornings at Smith's Wine Vaults. "Some people just want to end up on the floor!" said Arthur Post. 'Monty' Trolley was one of the first Bathonians (or Bath Onions as those born in Bath prefer to be called) to develop an interest in chaos theory. In fact it was a discussion he had with a local newspaper reporter that led to the "Chaos theory confirmed!" headline in the Bath & Wilting. "A gust of wind triggered by a freak storm in the Pacific led to the £1,000 cheque Bert Swiley had just pocketed from the ("we do not do refunds") One Is Born Every Minute! bookmakers in Peterpoint Street being snatched out of his cold sweaty hand. Mr Swiley told a reporter from that it meant he "was now officially 'on the floor' (OTF)."
Thanks to the Long Boom of Consumer Capitalism a diminishing number of people were finding themselves "on the floor" from the mid-1950s on. Yet money in the prefabs was still tight. When pupils at Weymouth House Technical School were invited to go on a four-day "low budget" trip to France both 'Ossie' Oster and 'Tubby' Lard raced home to tell their parents of the exciting news. (This was after Jane Lewis had stunned everyone by telling them that "oui" in French had nothing to do with going to the lavatory). 'Ossie' and 'Tubby' were stunned a second time in two days when they discovered that - far as their families were from being 'on the floor' - there was not enough money around for them to go on the trip. The upset they saw in their mums' eyes meant they would never mention a school trip ever again.