To today's generations, it must seem inconceivable that a newspaper found it worthwhile to busy itself raising money from better-off readers so poor children were well shod.

But the fund was meeting a real need, and from the 1920s into the Second World War, it carried out its charitable function, thereby establishing itself in the affections of the people of Leeds in particular, and Yorkshire in general.

Even in the 1980s, readers would write in to tell of the gratitude they had felt on receiving a smart new pair of boots, prudently marked in a way that inhibited parents from "popping" them at the local pawnshop in time of desperate need.

This comes to mind in contemplating the current credit-crunch, downturn, recession, call it what you will. An abiding image of the impact of the financial shakedown is of former employees of Lehman Brothers, the investment bank, trooping from its offices in London, their possessions in neat cardboard boxes.

Comparing this with 1930s photographs of thin, rickety, bare-footed children playing in the back-to-back streets of Leeds conveys some idea of the contrast, nay gulf, between the current downturn and the dreadful slump of the 1930s.

I was brought into the world in 1931, an act of faith on the part
of my parents, considering the state of the economy in the wake of the great Wall Street crash of October 29, 1931, which one commentator described as "a sudden fall down a precipice almost in a night, with seismic results in all countries".

England, embedded in the industrial age, was particularly vulnerable, especially in those parts like Yorkshire and the North East where the majority of wage earners worked in mills, pits, foundries and ship-building.

Leeds, with its rich mix that included engineering, mass-market tailoring and brewing, was sheltered somewhat from the harshest economic winds, but for all that there were chilly times in parts of the city, witness "Boots for Bairns".

Nationally, the number of unemployed, already unacceptably high in 1929 at 1,250,000, had soared to 2,750,000 people by 1931, and doubtless my father, a reporter on the Whitby Gazette, gave thanks he was not among them, for extreme poverty stalked the land.

In the Yorkshire coalfield, workless miners picked over the waste on slagheaps for coal to keep their families warm. In Wales, the future King Edward VIII (then Prince of Wales) exclaimed on witnessing the poverty created by the closure of the Dowlais Iron and Steel Works: "Something must be done." Hungry men demonstrated their desperation by going on the march, most memorably from Jarrow, the Tyneside town that its Labour MP, Ellen Wilkinson, proclaimed was being murdered.

Its marchers assembled on October 4, 1936 and set out for London. Mostly they were cordially received, greeted by cheering crowds, and well fed, but on arrival in York they found a police cordon across their path, and were put up in a workhouse. They were given bread and margarine to eat, and 200 police kept watch on them.

Northern parts of the country were hardest hit, and well-wishers like Harold Macmillan, then MP for Stockton, started clubs and centres for the unemployed. This prompted JB Priestley to write: "By the time the North of England is an industrial ruin, we shall be able to beat the whole world at table tennis."

Meanwhile, in America, Franklin Delano Roosevelt began the first of four terms as President in 1932, and countered what had become known as the Great Depression with his New Deal Programme. In Germany, Hitler was made Chancellor in 1933, and was soon building autobahns – and concentration camps, tanks, guns, battleships and warplanes.

With these memories, it is perhaps unsurprising that older generations will regard today's problems as comparatively minor. Even so, there is a pervading sense of unease, and an appreciation that many people are losing their jobs, and that all are finding money tighter.

A large proportion of the population, those who entered the workforce in the later years of Margaret Thatcher and under the governments of John Major and Tony Blair, have no experience of a downturn.

They have known only prosperity, and a climate in which it seemed perfectly acceptable for huge fortunes to be made in the City by shuttling money round the world, and right and proper to pay more than £1m a year to executives like the chief of Bradford & Bingley.

Perhaps they may find comfort in knowing that some of us have seen it all before, and somehow come through. If the 1930s were rough, the 1940s were frightening, the 1950s alarming, due mainly to an intensification of the Cold War, and the 1960s miserable, as we wobbled from one sterling crisis to another, with a devaluation of the pound in 1967 offering no lasting solution. Then came the 1970s, wild inflation, strikes, and the Winter of Discontent.

As we lurch through the current goings-on, one point may be worth keeping firmly in mind. We might, as one newspaper headline suggested, be "peering into the abyss", but however anxiously we scan its uttermost depths, thus far there is no glimpse of hungry children running barefoot on the streets of England.

Malcolm Barker is a former editor of the Yorkshire Evening Post.