History of England 1-6

Lloyd George emerged victorious from his battle with the Labour movement, but it was a pyrrhic victory. The alliance he had struck up with the unions during the war was broken beyond repair, and he could no longer pose as a ‘man of the people’. What chance did he and his coalition Liberals have of luring workingclass voters away from Labour, at a time when they were increasingly disappointed by the government’s failure to deliver on its promise to build a ‘fit country for heroes to live in’? While some progressive measures had been implemented, the most ambitious government projects were scaled down when the economic slump intervened. The 1919 Housing Act had offered local authorities the funds to build over 200,000 rental homes, yet when the slump arrived the building came to an abrupt halt with only half of the houses constructed.

In the middle of the slump, the coalition’s Unionist majority reminded the prime minister that national debt stood at £8,000 million – forty times higher than it had been in 1914. To the Unionists the slump was an opportunity to reduce the debt through public spending cuts, though this would have the effect of increasing unemployment and reducing aggregate demand in the economy. The alternative of raising income tax further seemed illogical, since Unionists regarded the rich as the productive classes on whom the economy depended. Allying itself with the popular ‘Anti-Waste’ campaign, which espoused the creed of efficiency and economy in government, the Unionist party promoted an emergency austerity programme that served as cover for their ideological aim of reducing public spending and general state intervention. Bowing to pressure, Lloyd George created a committee of businessmen to decide where the cuts should be made. The chosen victims included education, health and pensions, with the cuts amounting to £85 million. Labour politicians were quick to point out the prime minister’s hypocrisy: the man who posed as ‘the people’s champion’ had made the working class pay the nation’s debts.

16

England’s Irish question

While industrial action continued in England, another crisis broke out in Ireland. In truth Ireland had been in a permanent state of crisis ever since the Home Rule emergency of 1912–14, with the Easter Rising of 1916 followed by the anti-conscription protests of 1918. In 1919, the Sinn Féin-dominated Dáil in Dublin proclaimed a second Irish Republic, independent from the United Kingdom. Britain refused to acknowledge either the Republic or the Dáil, and ostensibly still oversaw the administration of the country from Dublin Castle. Yet the Dáil proceeded to bypass Britain’s colonial administration; they imposed taxes on the Irish people, directed local authorities and established their own courts of justice, police force and military, which was known as the Irish Republican Army (IRA).

This was a challenge to the empire, which at that point covered around a quarter of the earth’s land and incorporated a quarter of the world’s population. Yet the first two decades of the twentieth century had demonstrated that empire’s vulnerability, as well as Britain’s diminishing military and economic power. The Boer War and the Great War had severely tested the empire, while imperialism as an ideology was also under threat. The president of the United States had enshrined the principle of national self-determination in the Versailles Treaty, which encouraged many of Britain’s imperial territories to demand more autonomy. Independence movements flourished in Burma and Egypt, as well as in Ireland.

In India the National Congress was gaining in popularity under the leadership of Mohandas Karamchand ‘Mahatma’ Gandhi, a former London lawyer who demanded dominion status for the country. The Government of India Act 1919 increased the involvement of native Indians in provincial councils, which were given greater powers. But it was not enough to convince the population of the legitimacy of continued British rule; social tensions remained high, and martial law was imposed. The consequences of this decision were immediate. On 13 April 1919, large numbers of Sikhs gathered in a garden in Amritsar to celebrate a religious festival and stage a political protest. Following the orders of Colonel Dyer, British troops covered the exits of the garden and opened fire on the unarmed crowd. According to the colonel, it was not ‘a question of merely dispersing the crowd, but one of producing a sufficient moral effect from a military point of view’ throughout India. Between 380 and 1,000 people were killed.

Dyer received praise from Tories in parliament and in the press for ‘saving the Empire’. Although he was eventually dismissed from the army, a public collection for him raised £26,000. Anger at the killings spread throughout India. How could the English now claim to bring civilization to their ‘benighted’ subjects? In 1906 the British viceroy of India had spoken of ‘subduing’ the people of India, ‘not to the law of the sword but to the rule of justice’; now those words sounded hollow. In the aftermath of the massacre, many more Indians decided to support the National Congress. The incident marked the beginning of the end of British rule.

It was within the context of an overstretched and anxious empire that events in Ireland unfolded. Ireland was nominally part of the United Kingdom; its proximity made it vital to England’s security and prosperity. Unlike India, Egypt or Burma, the country had been under English influence since the twelfth century. Among those most concerned by the rise of Irish nationalism were the Unionists who dominated Lloyd George’s government; during the Home Rule crisis of 1912–14 they had zealously defended the interests of Protestant Unionists in north-east Ulster, even at the risk of civil war. The Ulster Unionists now lived in a de facto Irish republic, governed from Dublin by men who were from a different political, ethnic and sectarian tradition. The administrative control of the new republic did not extend to the north-east of Ulster, where the presence of British forces remained high, but there was no guarantee the situation would not change.

The Irish nationalist movement was composed of diverse elements, with differing aims. Many in Sinn Féin espoused independence from Britain, to be secured by peaceful methods where possible. On the other hand, the recently formed IRA was ready to fight the British and defend the recently proclaimed republic by force. The army was led by Michael Collins, who had a genius for military strategy.

The power and reach of Britain’s colonial administration was now diminished. Effective imperial government depended on the collaboration of the Irish population – on post office workers, tax collectors, local government officials and policemen – and the majority of them had voted for Sinn Féin. Judging that the time was now right to challenge British rule with force, the IRA declared war on the colonial government, thus beginning the ‘War of Independence’. Collins had learned from the failed Easter Rising that defeating the British by conventional military means was unrealistic; his plan was instead to make imperial rule in Ireland impossible. The IRA embarked on a series of guerrilla attacks on the personnel of the British state, ‘executing’ eighteen members of the Irish police force towards the end of 1919. The campaign was facilitated by Irish collaborators within the imperial police force and intelligence agency, and by countless members of the population who shielded the nationalist gunmen.

The success of the IRA campaign convinced the British government that its grip on Ireland was loosening, and its response was brutal. Lloyd George declared Sinn Féin illegal, appointed a draconian Irish chief secretary and recruited British ex-soldiers to ‘police’ Ireland. The unemployed ex-soldiers were promised ‘£15 a week … plenty of girls and lashings to drink’ as payment for destroying the IRA and quelling Irish nationalism. They formed a ‘terror squad’ and became known as the ‘Black and Tans’, a name that reflected the colour of their uniforms and recalled a breed of hunting hound. They proceeded to live up to their name by hunting down, kidnapping, torturing and executing suspects, raiding houses, looting shops and setting fire to entire villages.

The IRA responded by targeting the Black and Tans, while many civilians were caught in the crossfire. At Croke Park in Dublin on 21 November 1920, the Tans opened fire on a crowd watching a Gaelic football match. Twelve people were killed and sixty wounded on what became known as ‘Bloody Sunday’. The British chief secretary claimed the forces had acted in self-defence, but it was in fact an act of revenge for the IRA’s killing of twelve British intelligence agents and members of its forces earlier in the day.

The Croke Park massacre and other atrocities undermined any moral or legal authority the British might try to claim in Ireland. British brutality also inspired further popular support for nationalism, which undermined the numerical advantage the British forces enjoyed over the IRA. As reports of British cruelty reached England, and as the death toll rose to over 1,000 (in a population of only 3 million), the liberal English press and intelligentsia increasingly sympathized with Irish nationalism and condemned the ‘terroristic’ methods of the coalition, which now declared martial law. George Bernard Shaw, an Irish dramatist and intellectual with considerable popularity in England, drew a parallel between the Black and Tans terror and the Amritsar massacre, and some of the English elite agreed with this analysis. ‘Things are being done in Ireland,’ Asquith told parliament, ‘which would disgrace the blackest annals of the lowest despotism in Europe.’ ‘Are you going to shoot all the people in Ireland?’ King George asked Lloyd George. When the prime minister shook his head, the king continued, ‘Well, then you must come to some agreement with them. This thing cannot go on.’

At first, Lloyd George had defended the Black and Tans as ‘bravely’ defending the ‘civilisation’ of a ‘glorious’ empire from the threat of ‘terrorism’. Yet eventually he was forced to admit that ‘mistakes’ had been made by ‘a certain number of undesirables’. He was also compelled to pursue a more constructive policy. He introduced a fourth Home Rule Bill, officially called the Government of Ireland Act, which was passed at the end of 1920. By the terms of the act, one Home Rule parliament was established in Dublin, and another in Belfast to oversee the six counties of Ulster with substantial Protestant populations. Representatives of these two bodies would meet in a Council of Ireland, while a reduced number of Irish MPs would continue to sit in Westminster. The country would continue to acknowledge the ultimate authority of the British monarch and his representative in Ireland, the Lord Lieutenant.

Unsurprisingly, this compromise satisfied none of the interested parties. The Irish nationalists did not recognize the Dublin Home Rule parliament and instead continued to convene the Dáil; the Ulster Unionists refused to acknowledge the Council of Ireland. The Unionists did, however, accept the new parliament in Belfast, despite their objection to Home Rule. Following the passing of the act, elections were held for both Home Rule parliaments. The Unionists won an 80 per cent majority in the ‘six counties’ in Ulster, while Sinn Féin claimed virtually every seat in the south. These results merely served to confirm the stalemate; they also exacerbated sectarian divisions, as violence spread throughout Ulster. Thousands of Catholics were forcibly evacuated from Belfast housing estates and anti-Catholic discrimination was common on the streets. The IRA, meanwhile, killed Protestant policemen in the ‘six counties’, while the Dáil decided to boycott trade between the ‘north’ and ‘south’.

Yet some good came out of the elections. When King George travelled to Belfast to open the northern Home Rule parliament, he called for ‘the end of strife amongst [Ireland’s] people, whatever their race or creed’. The monarch’s words were followed by a truce, along with talks in London for a peace treaty. The chances of finding a compromise solution remained slim – the nationalists demanded an independent republic for all Ireland, while the Tory-dominated coalition was determined to preserve the ‘integrity of the Empire’ as well as the interests of the Unionists of Ulster, who were once again threatening civil war. ‘If you are unable to protect us from the machinations of Sinn Féin,’ Carson warned the government, ‘we will take the matter into our own hands. At all costs, and notwithstanding the consequences.’

Lloyd George offered the nationalist delegation dominion status for the twenty-six counties outside of the six counties of Ulster with substantial Protestant populations. The southern dominion, to be called the ‘Irish Free State’, would be self-governing and free from British forces; members of its parliament would, however, still swear an oath of allegiance to the British monarch as official head of state. The six counties in Ulster, meanwhile, were offered the right to remain part of the United Kingdom under the name ‘Northern Ireland’. Privately, though, Lloyd George promised the nationalists that the boundary would be drawn in such a way that the six-county northern state would be politically and economically unworkable; Northern Ireland would, he implied, soon have to join the Irish Free State. The prime minister also confirmed his acceptance of a de facto united Irish dominion by officially designating the treaty a settlement ‘between Great Britain and Ireland’.

Tempering these private promises with the threat of renewed hostilities, Lloyd George badgered and bullied the nationalist representatives into signing the treaty on 6 December 1921. Collins realized that it did not represent ‘the ultimate freedom that all nations desire and develop to’, yet believed it gave Ireland the ‘freedom to achieve’ that position. Most people in Ireland greeted the news that agreement had been reached with relief, yet the treaty’s critics argued that it opened up the near certainty of partition. Éamon de Valera refused to take an oath of allegiance to the British king and resigned as Dáil president soon after; Sinn Féin split into proand anti-treaty factions. These two groupings would fight a civil war that would last for around a year and claim 2,000 lives – a bloody beginning for the new ‘free’ state.

Immediately after the signing of the treaty, the Ulster Unionists opted out of the Free State. The ‘territory’, ‘province’ or ‘region’ of Northern Ireland was thereby established, and the union to which England belonged became ‘The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland’. As the civil war raged in the south, the Unionists consolidated their power within Northern Ireland. They shaped electoral constituencies to guarantee clear Protestant majorities, and passed a Special Powers Act that gave the Unionist police the power to search and imprison Catholics without trial. The question of where the boundary would be drawn remained undecided for the duration of the Irish Civil War. After that conflict had ended, the impoverished Irish Free State, now led by De Valera, officially accepted the treaty and renounced its claim to govern the two Catholic-nationalist majority ‘Northern Irish’ counties of Fermanagh and Tyrone. In return the British government cancelled Ireland’s debts to the British Empire. The British Boundary Commission of 1925 would confirm Northern Ireland’s status as a six-county state.

In the long term, the treaty and partition failed to solve England’s ‘Irish question’. Over the succeeding decades, Unionist-dominated Northern Ireland would oppress its Catholic population, creating resentment both north and south of the border. That border would become a focus for attacks by the IRA, whose aim was to end partition and expel British forces from Irish soil. The Irish Free State, meanwhile, would last for a mere fifteen years, after which the Dáil renounced Ireland’s dominion status and proclaimed the sovereignty of ‘Éire’ under a new constitution.

In the days following the 1921 treaty, Lloyd George was praised by his Liberal coalition colleagues for breaking the ten-year stalemate in Ireland, and for ending decades of uncertainty over the country’s constitutional status. Many on the right, meanwhile, looked forward to reaping the benefits of the new electoral dispensation, which ensured that a majority of Unionists would be returned to Westminster from Northern Ireland, while no Liberal-leaning Irish MPs from the south would sit in the Commons. Liberated from Irish issues, many Unionists started referring to themselves again as ‘Conservatives’ or ‘Tories’, and the old name of ‘the Conservative party’ was eventually restored.

Yet not everyone in the Conservative party welcomed the developments in Ireland. Fifty or so ‘die-hard’ Tory Unionists denounced the treaty as a betrayal of the Protestants living in the Irish Free State. They argued that a series of IRA terror attacks in Northern Ireland and London proved that Lloyd George had not settled the ‘Irish question’, openly criticizing the prime minister and attempting to turn their fellow Tories against him. While the majority of Tories continued to support Lloyd George, their enthusiasm for the coalition ebbed; when he started selling countless peerages and knighthoods for his own personal gain, it evaporated. ‘Bronco Bill’ Sutherland, an associate of the prime minister, would trawl London’s clubs and offer plutocrats baronetcies for around £10,000. One hundred and thirty baronetcies were sold in this way, along with 26 peerages and almost 500 knighthoods.

All governments sold honours in this way, and the Tories happily took some of the proceeds. What irritated them was that most of the money went to Lloyd George’s personal fund, since he was a politician without an official party. Besides, offering honours so indiscriminately made a mockery of a system designed to glorify and perpetuate the British ruling class, as well as the British Empire and the monarch who reigned over it. It is hardly surprising that George V accused his prime minister of ‘debasing’ the whole system, a charge that did not trouble the egalitarian Lloyd George. Yet many Conservatives took the king’s view, and began looking among their own ranks for a potential replacement.

There was, however, time for one last adventure. Lloyd George attempted to gain popular backing for British military intervention in support of Greece in its struggle against a resurgent Turkey. The Turks showed no desire to provoke the British forces into war, and the incident served only to emphasize how isolated Britain was and how overstretched its empire had become. Stanley Baldwin, an MP rising rapidly through the Conservative ranks, denounced Lloyd George at a Tory party meeting as a ‘terrible dynamic force’ that might split the Tories. It was time for the Tories to break away from the coalition, form a government and then fight an election under their own leader and on their own platform.

Buoyed by a recent by-election victory and encouraged by continuing division among the Liberals, the majority of Conservative MPs agreed with Baldwin. They had had enough of ‘the Welsh attorney’ ‘dictating’ to their party. Yet Austen Chamberlain, who had recently become party leader when Law had retired owing to ill health, took a different view; a split within the Conservative party seemed possible. After the vote of no confidence in the coalition Chamberlain resigned from the cabinet, followed by Lloyd George. The news of the resignations improved Law’s health significantly, and he took over the leadership of a caretaker Tory government. He would remain in power briefly while parliament was dissolved and a general election called.

When Lloyd George resigned, King George remarked that he would soon be prime minister again. Law and Asquith were too old to lead the country and MacDonald’s opportunity had not yet come, while Churchill belonged to the coalition Liberals who had lost their raison d’être. Yet without a powerful party to support him, there would never be a return to Downing Street for Lloyd George. The Tories thus tethered the Liberal scapegoat, before leading him out into the wilderness.

17

Gay as you like

If events in Ireland suggested the empire was breaking up, strikes across England suggested that society was breaking down. Unrest, discontent and division pervaded the country, while memories of the carnage on the Western Front were still vivid. It is hardly surprising that social and cultural life in the Twenties was characterized by confusion, pessimism and disquietude, yet there were also signs of vitality and exhilaration. Many would describe the decade as a time during which youth rebelled against their elders and attempted to forget the past.

Along with the flappers, the most famous revellers of the period were the bohemian aristocratic sets known as the ‘bright young things’. They largely comprised rich young hooligans from Oxbridge and the older public schools, along with their girlfriends and acquaintances. According to Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies, the novel that immortalized them, their chief purpose was to party: ‘masked parties, savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties, almost naked parties in St John’s Wood, parties in ships and hotels and night clubs, in windmills and swimming baths’. This last gathering was the famous ‘Bath and Bottle party’ at St George’s swimming baths in London, where flowers and rubber horses floated on water illuminated by coloured spotlights. The guests, dressed in dazzling swimming costumes, drank ‘Bathwater Cocktails’ and danced to the strains of a black jazz orchestra, sometimes hurling themselves into the pool.

At these parties the transgressive infantilism of the set was given full and eccentric expression. The elder brothers, cousins, uncles and fathers of the bright young things had reached adulthood before the war, and many were now maimed, scarred or dead. Why should the young generation follow in footsteps that had led to the mass grave of the Western Front? The defiance of the group was also tinged with guilt at having been too young to die beside their older relatives.

The parties tended to be informal, crammed, wild and noisy. Obscenity and excess were the keynotes, as partygoers enjoyed sex, gin and ‘uppies’ (cocaine). The young hooligans also partied at breakneck speed: ‘they rush from one restaurant and party to another,’ a contemporary noted, ‘to a third and fourth in the course of an evening, and finish up with an early morning bathing party, transported at 60 mph to the swimming baths of Eton, or a race down the Great West Road.’ The young hedonists zigzagged across country roads ‘at high speed, under the influence of drink, in the hope, if there was a smash, that the case would be reported in the Sunday newspapers’.

The escapades of the young aristocrats were the hysterical last hurrah of that class. Having lost its grip on the Commons and its veto in the Lords, the aristocracy no longer dominated British politics. In economic terms, too, the caste was in decline. Taxes on land had been historically high during the war; after the armistice the Central LandOwners Association demanded the exchequer repeal them. Yet the anti-establishment Lloyd George maintained the land tax, and almost 50 per cent of country houses and 8 million acres of land were put on the market between 1918 and 1922. Over the decade that followed, the atrophy continued. By the time the American-born Tory MP Henry ‘Chips’ Channon visited a number of the old great houses in the Thirties, he was overwhelmed by ‘the feel and smell of decay, of aristocracy in extremis’. There had perhaps been no greater change at the summit of English society since the Norman Conquest.

While the aristocracy was diminished in political and economic terms, its members remained influential in the creation of society’s crazes and fashions. Their influence was strong in the arts, where some of the set promoted ‘modernism’. That artistic movement was characterized by a conscious rejection of classical styles, and an interest in forms and themes appropriate to an urbanized and industrialized society. The children of privilege promoted avant-garde trends in music and painting, such as jazz and cubism, while in literature they championed the radical innovations of the ‘Bloomsbury Group’.

Virginia Woolf was Bloomsbury’s best and boldest novelist. The stream-of-consciousness style she employed in Mrs Dalloway (1925) oscillates between direct and indirect speech, interior monologue and soliloquy. Like the bright young people, Woolf rebelled against the formal conventions and the ethos of the Edwardian period – a ‘fatal age’, according to her, ‘when character disappeared’. Meanwhile, T. S. Eliot, an American associate of the Bloomsbury Group, dramatized the disintegration of Western civilization during the war in his long poem The Waste Land (1922). In its deep ambiguities and elisions, and in its fragmented form, Eliot’s poem reflected the post-war period with all its anxieties, fears for the future and mournful memories. Many of the first readers of The Waste Land struggled to find meaning in its plethora of voices, styles, allusions and images, yet the poem was written to be uttered rather than understood. The bright young people heard the poem’s plangent music and realized that its rhythms and melodies were more important than its ‘meaning’.

Eliot occasionally attended parties organized by the bright young things, as did other Bloomsbury authors, such as Lytton Strachey. In newspaper interviews Strachey expressed sympathy with the set’s ‘struggle’ against the older generation and its harmful ‘taboos and restrictions’. His comments offer an insight into both the psychology of the bright young people, and the author’s own modernist tract, Eminent Victorians (1918). Strachey’s collection of biographical essays – or rather assassinations – had been written in the war, during which the author was a conscientious objector. Instead of writing the earnest, exhaustive and exhausting biographies favoured by the Edwardians and Victorians, Strachey penned short, sprightly and ironic portraits. His purpose was to attack his subject in ‘unexpected places [and] shoot a sudden, revealing searchlight into obscure recesses’. To achieve those ends Strachey drew upon the psychoanalytical theories of Sigmund Freud. In Eminent Victorians Strachey poured scorn on the Victorian values of Christianity and imperial service that had been espoused by a generation of ‘mouthing bungling hypocrites’. Those values had helped bring about the war, he implied, yet they were still being adhered to by the older generation.

Some of the bright young men also ridiculed pre-war ideas and ideals of masculinity. Beards, moustaches and pipes were discarded as outmoded emblems of male pomposity. The new men favoured clean-shaven faces, and brushed back their oiled hair. They sported outlandish, self-parodic costumes that were as far away as possible from Edwardian male seriousness. And, just as the flappers had appropriated masculine fashion, the bright young men purloined clothes traditionally associated with women: ‘nowadays,’ as one of them remarked, ‘boys are girlish.’ They wore wide trousers called ‘Oxford bags’, which billowed around the legs and came in light, bright shades. The suede shoes and high-necked pullovers favoured by the men likewise featured soft colours; they were the first males ever to don pink shirts. Their waistcoats were flamboyant and their evening dress was embellished with patterns. They wore attractive wristwatches and constantly consulted them with a flourish of the forearm. As a result, wristwatches became associated with effeminacy; men who did not meet acceptable standards of masculinity were referred to as ‘terribly wristwatch’ or as having ‘a wristwatch accent’. An effeminate enunciation and vocabulary was cultivated by bright young men. ‘My dear, how could you!’ they would exclaim. Their effeminate argot was brought to the stage by Noël Coward, whose plays enjoyed success towards the end of the decade.

Some of the bright young men were effeminate, some were homosexual and some were both. Of American descent, Brian Christian de Claiborne Howard grew up despising his father and adoring his mother. Tall, pale, aloof and flamboyant, Howard swaggered his way from Eton and Christ Church college, Oxford, to the West End, leaving a trail of pink champagne bottles and quotable utterances in his wake. He planned spoof art exhibitions, elaborate practical jokes, and parties at which he would cut a dashing figure in cross-dress or historical costumes. Some of Howard’s historical parties had themes such as ‘Homosexual Lovers Through the Ages’, a daring idea when the laws that had condemned Oscar Wilde to two years’ hard labour were still on the statute book. Howard was a dandy like Wilde, and together they established the figure as a gay archetype. Evelyn Waugh admired Howard’s ‘dash and insolence’, but others were less than enthralled by his self-centredness and melancholy. As the years passed, he became increasingly morose, like so many of the bright young people. He wallowed in lost youthful promise and in the fading of his gilded youth, like a goldfish in a emptying pool.

And indeed, even at the height of their gay abandon, melancholy pervaded the hedonistic parties of the age. When their infantile indulgences began to pall, these spoiled children were paralysed by tedium. ‘Bored young faces’ peer out at us from the pages of Waugh’s Vile Bodies, emanating a ‘sense of desolation, of uncertainty, of futility’. Another novelist, Richard Aldington, detected the same air of despondency: ‘all night the restless feet stamped … and the joyless rejoiced without joy; and at dawn, when the wind breathed an immense sigh … You could almost hear the rattle of the bones in this macabre pageant.’ The image of the desolate dawn was commonplace in eyewitness accounts of parties, suggesting a foreboding for the future as well as an inability to dance away the memory of the recent conflict. It is telling that Waugh’s portrait of the group, Vile Bodies, ends on the battlefield of a future war.

18

Labour at the summit

Lloyd George’s fall from power was followed by a decisive Conservative victory at the 1922 election. According to some commentators, Law won the election for the simple reason that he was not Lloyd George. ‘A drummer boy is an asset in battle,’ the taciturn Tory leader told voters during the campaign, ‘but he and his drum are a nuisance in peacetime.’ British voters agreed; their desire was for the ‘tranquillity’ and ‘stability’ Law promised. According to Stanley Baldwin, now elevated to the Exchequer, the electorate also voted for honesty, a quality Lloyd George signally lacked.

In fact, it was more complicated. The election result was a rebellion made in the shadow of the war. Four years after the armistice, the conflict and its consequences were still the central issues of politics, and the Tories won the election by proposing to govern as though it had never happened. Law declared that he would give free scope to the initiative and enterprise of the people, by reining in the power of the state. His call for minimum interference by the government heralded the end of ‘war socialism’, and of Lloyd George’s ambitious plans to rebuild a better country. The Tories also claimed victory courtesy of the new electoral dispensation in Ireland and the bias of a voting system which inflated their 38 per cent of the popular vote into 56 per cent of the parliamentary seats.

Yet despite its secure majority, the government lacked strength and stability. Austen Chamberlain declined to join Law’s government, along with various other ‘Conservative coalitionists’. Meanwhile, Law’s health was failing, and he resigned after only a few months in office. Who would replace the man Asquith had dubbed ‘The Unknown Prime Minister’? Lord Curzon was regarded by many as the heir apparent. The patrician peer had been foreign secretary since 1919, and he had held office under both Balfour and Salisbury. With his experience, background and air of authority, Curzon believed himself to be destined for the leadership.

Yet the party of the old aristocracy overlooked the autocratic lord for Stanley Baldwin, the son of an iron and steel magnate, and a member of the Commons. The choice was a sign of the ascendancy of the lower house at Westminster and indicated how far power had shifted to the businessmen within the Tory party. Despite his relative inexperience, Baldwin had the confidence of the City and of the commercial sector. Tory grandees complained that their party was being vulgarized by the advent of the plutocracy Baldwin represented, but their caste no longer dominated the party or the country. With characteristic pragmatism and shrewdness, Baldwin acknowledged the aristocracy’s cultural power by posing as a countrified businessman, yet it is notable that he promoted talented men from the middling rank. The most significant appointment in his first government was Neville Chamberlain as minister of health and then as chancellor of the Exchequer.

The Tories’ decision to back a businessman rather than an aristocrat brought few benefits in the short term. Baldwin had been instrumental in bringing down Lloyd George and was consequently distrusted by the coalition Conservatives. And then, only six months into his premiership, the prime minister had a Damascene conversion to Joseph Chamberlain’s controversial protectionist programme. Since Baldwin felt he required a popular mandate to implement such a radical proposal, he called an election. The inexperienced prime minister believed he could attract recently enfranchised voters with the arguments Joseph Chamberlain had elaborated two decades previously: if tariffs were imposed on imports coming from outside the empire, then trade would be boosted within it; this would protect jobs at home and revive England’s ailing industries. It would also raise revenue without the need to increase taxes. At the same time, the embattled empire would be transformed into a single economic unit with free trade inside its frontiers.

A new generation of voters, however, showed little enthusiasm for the old Chamberlainite cocktail of economic reform, social legislation and imperialism. At the 1923 election, the Tories lost 86 Commons seats. Although they remained the largest party in parliament, they had failed to win a popular mandate for protectionism; with his flagship policy rejected, Baldwin was reluctant to form a government. Neville Chamberlain, faithful to Baldwin and to his father’s memory, blamed the defeat on ‘the new electorate’, while Curzon attributed it to Baldwin’s ‘utter incompetence’. Yet Baldwin somehow survived as leader – the first of the many escapes that would characterize his career. That was partly due to a lack of alternative leadership candidates, but it was also because his espousal of protectionism and of ‘Tory democracy’ had positive side effects. It united the Conservative party and nudged the Tories towards the centre ground of politics. In an increasingly democratic era, that was an advantageous position for the party of privilege to occupy.

The real story of the 1922 and 1923 elections, however, was the rise of Labour. The party claimed 142 seats in 1922 (up 80 from the previous parliament), and 191 seats in 1923. This figure compared favourably to the 115 seats of a Liberal party which had recently reunited under Asquith’s leadership, and was 70 seats short of the Conservatives’ total. Over the two elections Labour established itself as the main opposition to the Tories – two decades after its formation, the party of the ‘have-nots’ was close to having power. Among the causes of Labour’s ascent, the widespread radicalism in post-war Britain and the party’s broad appeal to the working and lower middle classes who had been enfranchised in 1918 played a significant part.

Labour represented the newly enfranchised classes in a literal sense, filling the benches of the 1922 and 1923 parliaments with men from the working and lower middle classes. The arrival of the ‘masses’ at Westminster led to a marked change in its etiquette. Plainly dressed MPs from northern English (and Scottish) constituencies favoured an impassioned ‘soapbox’ style when denouncing unemployment or expressing solidarity with the underprivileged. On one occasion the new men broke out into a loud rendition of the party’s socialist anthem, ‘The Red Flag’, to the horror of the Speaker who suspended the session. The Morning Post condemned such ‘Bolshevist frightfulness’, while the Conservatives denounced the song as a ‘hymn of hate’.

Yet along with these radical workingclass MPs, a new breed of middle-class Labour politician entered the Commons. None of the Labour MPs elected in 1918 had attended public school, and only one had attended university; the overwhelming majority had been working men sponsored by the unions. But in the 1923 parliament, there were nine ex-public school and twenty-one university-educated Labour men, while the union-sponsored MPs were no longer in the majority. Some of the new recruits were middle-class intellectuals with links to the Fabians and the old Independent Labour Party, such as Clement Attlee, an Oxford graduate who had fought at Gallipoli. Others had only recently joined Labour from the Liberals, out of despair at the ineffectiveness of their old party. Labour was no longer the protest party of a single class or the parliamentary wing of the unions – it was starting to resemble the socialist workingand middle-class alliance that Ramsay MacDonald had envisaged after the war.

It is entirely fitting that the party now chose MacDonald, who had returned to the Commons in 1922, as its leader. He was a much better parliamentarian than his rival in the leadership contest, the union man John Clynes, and he was also a public orator of genius. His lyricism inspired comparisons with Lloyd George, as did his sharp political intelligence and instinct for survival. If Labour had always been a party of protest and practical politics, MacDonald was a master of both.

Yet despite these qualities, MacDonald had won the leadership contest only by the narrowest of margins, and the revolutionary wing of the party would soon complain about the moderate brand of evolutionist socialism he espoused as party leader. He believed that social progress could be made through parliament alone; British society, he argued, had an ‘enormous capacity to resist change’, because of the strength of its ‘inherited habits, modes of thought and traditions’. This inherent inertia meant that change could only be gradual. MacDonald believed that Labour might permanently replace the Liberal party as the main opposition to the Conservatives; a socialist utopia could wait for another day.

The 191 seats Labour won at the 1923 election made it the largest party to espouse free trade. Since voters favoured that policy over Tory protectionism, Labour had, Asquith declared, earned the right to govern the country with the support of his pro-free-trade Liberal party. Privately, the Liberal leader was hopeful that a minority Labour government would soon mutate into a free-trade coalition that he might lead. The ‘wild’ and ‘beggarly’ men who sat beside MacDonald on the front bench were, Asquith felt, likely to bring down his feeble government. There was a sense among the political elite that a Labour administration was inevitable, and that it could not be tried under safer conditions. Baldwin and Chamberlain espoused this argument – a minority Labour government ‘would be too weak to do much harm’, the latter commented, ‘but not too weak to get discredited’.

Even so, some prominent members of society were appalled by the idea of Labour governing the country. When the idea of a Labour administration was mooted, there was considerable nervousness over the prospect of a socialist ‘power grab’. The City and the press echoed the establishment’s fear and anger, and Asquith received ‘appeals, threats and prayers from all parts to step in and save the country from the horrors of socialism and confiscation’. Yet in the end the Liberal leader and his Tory counterpart decided that their parties ought not to stand in the way of MacDonald’s men, in case it provoked outrage in the country.

Would Labour accept what might turn out to be a poisoned chalice? Many in the movement advised against doing so, for fear that a minority government was bound to fail. Others warned that the party of idealistic socialism would be tainted by an inherently conservative political system. Yet MacDonald argued that it was only by accepting office that Labour could prove it was ‘fit to govern’. They must, he said, demonstrate that they could work within the existing political framework. If they rejected the opportunity, they would risk losing all of the electoral gains they had made since the war. In the end, MacDonald’s view prevailed.

And so Britain had its first ever Labour government, to the trepidation and astonishment of some party purists. One member of the new government remarked on the ‘strange turn of Fortune’s wheel’ that had brought a ‘starveling clerk’ (MacDonald), a foundry labourer (Henderson) and ‘Clynes the mill hand’ to receive the seals of office from the king at Buckingham Palace, and George V himself was no less astonished: ‘I wonder what Grandmama [Victoria] would have thought of a Labour Government,’ he commented. Nevertheless, the king was impressed with the new prime minister who, he felt, ‘wishes to do the right thing’. In fact, the apparently ill-matched pair struck up a friendship that would prove to be an enduring one. So far as King George was concerned, the ‘socialist’ MacDonald was an improvement on the discourteous Lloyd George and the ‘indolent’ Baldwin, while the Labour party was now much less of a menace to the crown, having expunged all traces of republicanism from its constitution in the early Twenties. As for MacDonald, the king’s good opinion offered an entrée into society. In a development that perhaps did not bode well for harmony in the Labour party, some of MacDonald’s backbenchers began to refer to their leader as ‘Gentleman Mac’.

As a minority government, MacDonald’s administration had no scope to introduce a radical social or economic programme, yet this may have suited the new prime minister’s purposes. Although there was a majority of workingclass men in the cabinet for the first time in history, MacDonald also selected various ex-Liberals and a number of aristocrats. He gave the key position of chancellor to Philip Snowden, who agreed with MacDonald that Labour should ‘show the country we are not under the domination of the wild men’.

Accordingly, Snowden produced a budget in the Gladstonian rather than the socialist mould. He reduced food taxes and set aside money for the historic Wheatley Housing Act, by which half a million council houses would be built for low-paid workers. Yet the Labour chancellor was unwilling to increase the country’s debt by using public spending to counteract unemployment, which remained stubbornly above 1 million. During one debate on the issue, the new minister of labour confessed that he could not ‘produce rabbits out of a hat’.

Industrial action was an inevitable consequence of the parlous economic situation. The strikes forced Labour politicians to condemn as ‘disloyal’ and ‘Communistic’ protests with which they had formerly sympathized. They also had to refuse the demands of the very unions who funded them. Some trade unionists now openly defied the government; Ernest Bevin, leader of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, refused to call off a strike when requested to do so by MacDonald, and there was also discontent among Labour backbenchers. Even middle-class MPs such as Attlee were disappointed by the party’s failure to produce effective policies, and concerned by the disdain MacDonald displayed for some of his proletarian colleagues. Meanwhile, relations between the administration and Asquith’s Liberals had also deteriorated, and without a majority in the Commons it was impossible to carry out parliamentary business.

Yet it was not internecine warfare or Asquith that brought down the government, but its supposed sympathy towards Soviet Russia. When MacDonald’s administration signed a commercial treaty with the country and quashed the prosecution of a communist British journalist, there was shock and anger. But it was nothing compared to the furore that followed the publication of a letter from the Russian President of the Communist International, implicating the government in communist activities. The letter was a fairly obvious forgery, but following its publication in the Daily Mail, ‘red peril’ hysteria spread throughout the country. It was an early example of the domination of British democracy by the popular press, which would become even more pronounced over the course of the century. The controversy gave the Conservatives an opportunity to attack the weak government; MacDonald resigned, and an election was called.

The Conservatives were in a better position to fight an election in 1924 than they had been a year previously, with Baldwin’s protectionist programme having united his party. Now the Tory leader made another astute move, dropping his unpopular Tariff Reform programme to deny the Liberals their traditional election cry of ‘anti-protection’. He shrewdly declined to set out detailed policy proposals during the campaign, but instead concentrated on criticizing MacDonald and his ministers. With the help of their friends in the press, the Tories communicated a simple message to the electorate: ‘a vote for Socialists is a vote for the Communists’.

At the election the Tories polled around 47 per cent of the popular vote and gained 67 per cent of the seats in the Commons. Liberal voters had turned to the Tories in their thousands; Asquith’s party lost 75 per cent of its seats and was reduced to a mere forty MPs, with the leader himself one of the casualties. Keynes predicted that the party would never again hold office but would instead become a political finishing school, supplying Labour with ideas and the Tories with ministers. Churchill would soon rejoin the Conservative party, retracing the steps he had made two decades previously. His desertion of the Liberal party was understandable. As an idealist intent on opposing socialism and promoting ‘Tory democracy’, it would have been pointless to remain. It was now obvious that the Liberals had no hope of challenging Labour as the main opposition party to the Tories: MacDonald’s men had increased their share of the popular vote to 33 per cent.

The election finally delivered the political stability the Tories had promised voters after the fall of Lloyd George two years earlier. There had been three elections, three prime ministers and two leadership battles since then, but the political turbulence was stilled. Clear battle lines were now drawn between the Conservatives and Labour, who had between them obliterated the Liberals and nullified the influence of that party’s mercurial genius Lloyd George. The two major parties were united under skilful leaders, both of whom had the experience of an unsuccessful term of government behind them. Given its superior resources, the backing of the press and the vagaries of the electoral system, it was inevitable that the Tory party would enjoy the larger share of power for the foreseeable future.

19

Where is the match?

Baldwin, now almost sixty, presented himself to the public as an unassuming country gentleman. On meeting him for the first time, few would have guessed that he came from a family with an industrial empire. The Tory leader would pause mid-sentence to take a long draw on his trademark pipe, a symbol of the Victorian rural world to which Baldwin constantly referred. In this bygone place, ‘old gentlemen spent their days sitting on the handles of wheelbarrows smoking’ while listening to ‘the tinkle of the hammer on the anvil in the country smithy’. This was England before the strikes, the gas canisters and the disintegrating empire; a society in which everyone had a place and everyone knew what it was. Baldwin believed in the population’s inherent love of the countryside and the domestic hearth. The English were, he thought, a nostalgic and conservative people, distinguished by the virtues of decency, modesty, justice and common sense.

‘Master Stanley’ claimed to have a second-class intellect, despite his education at Harrow and Cambridge. Yet first-class intellects, he claimed, were usually reluctant to follow instructions. Dangerous men of genius, such as Lloyd George, also made the mistake of believing they could solve problems through initiative. Far better to do nothing, the prime minister reckoned, or to cautiously react to events as they unfolded. The middle-class industrialist thus cast himself as the heir of Salisbury and Balfour; he provided a bridge between the plutocratic Tory party he led and the party of landed wealth over which his predecessors had presided.

When Baldwin took office, the king urged him to combat class war, but the Tory leader needed no urging. His vision of a harmonious England marked him out as a ‘onenation Tory’ of the Disraelian school, while his Tariff Reform programme of 1923 demonstrated that he was also a ‘Tory democrat’ in the mode of Chamberlain and Randolph Churchill. He criticized Labour for exacerbating class division and struggle, while his party stood ‘for the unity of the nation, and of all interests and classes within it’. He preferred to focus in speeches on potentially unifying issues, such as ‘Englishness’ or ‘the countryside’, rather than on controversial or divisive party-political matters. He also attempted to revive popular interest in the empire, and to associate his party with national institutions such as the monarchy and the Anglican Church. He had Baldwin’s remarkable management skills, as well as that sense of timing which is indispensable to a successful politician. This selfeffacing and ostentatiously average Englishman had known exactly when to strike Lloyd George, the pre-eminent politician of the age.

On entering Downing Street in 1924, Baldwin declared that his ambition was ‘to bring about a unity of the nation’, yet the nation he governed was characterized by class division. George Orwell would call England ‘the most class-ridden country under the sun’. It was assumed that every aspect of an English person’s character and life – his or her education, attire, health, opinions, pastimes, manners, aspirations, wages and pronunciation – depended on social position.

It was certainly true that the working classes were less healthy than people higher up the scale. When in work, they had to ‘make do’ with a low weekly cash wage out of which they paid rent. Moving above the crucial £250-per-year threshold and through the gradations of the middle class, monthly salaries were more common, along with the ownership of houses and motor cars and the employment of servants. In the final band were the upper classes who had a monopoly on the country’s wealth. One per cent of the nation owned two-thirds of its assets.

Antagonism between the classes was acute and palpable. ‘The upper class,’ commented one Liberal MP, ‘despise the working people: the middle class fear them.’ The workers, with their collective bargaining power and readiness to strike, were a threat to those ‘above’ them. Manual workers appeared, to middleand upper-class eyes, ‘uncouth’, ‘filthy’ and ‘militant’; their wage ‘demands’ were seen as exorbitant, while the unemployment benefits that supported them when they were out of work seemed undeserved and costly.

There was also little solidarity between the upper and middle classes. Members of the upper class regarded the middling ranks as vulgar and insolent; their children were seldom permitted to play with ‘such people’, in case they picked up unfortunate habits. For their part, the middle classes were more critical of unearned upper-class wealth in the Twenties than perhaps at any other period in the century. The middling orders did, however, feel a residual awe for the waning aristocracy, and expressed this in an enthusiasm for the monarchy and the cultivation of upper-class accents. They also aspired to send their children to private schools, the ‘engines of privilege’ through which the upper class perpetuated their power. Meanwhile, both the middle and upper classes were resented by the workers. Baldwin was aware of ‘a growing feeling of class consciousness’ and a ‘bitter antagonism running through the workshops, north and south, east and west’, though he blamed it on the propaganda of the Labour party.

Class was not the only thing that divided the English – there was also the experience of the trenches. Those who had fought in the war and received scant reward for their suffering felt isolated from the rest of the population. ‘All was not right with their spirit,’ a journalist commented of workingclass ex-privates. ‘They were subject to queer moods, fits of depression alternating with a restless desire for pleasure … the daily newspapers have been filled with the record of dreadful crimes, of violence and passion … The murders of young women, the outrages upon little girls.’ As usual, it was women who suffered the consequences of male alienation. As for the upper-middle-class and aristocratic officers, those who came home from the war found the old Edwardian guard still in charge of landed society, as though ‘the great interruption’ had never occurred.

Almost every facet of English life in the Twenties was marked by conflict between the generations. There was a sharp contrast between the regular church attendance of a portion of the older generation, for example, and the steep decline in churchgoing among the young. ‘We are lukewarm in religion,’ commented the young philosopher and radio broadcaster C. E. M. Joad, ‘unimpressed by authority, distrustful of moral codes, and impatient of moral restraints.’ Once more, the experience of war seems to have been decisive. Millions had prayed for peace, but their prayers had gone unanswered. What kind of God would sit by and watch such carnage? Besides, patriotic church ministers from all Christian denominations had encouraged the butchery; how could the young generation genuflect before them?

Baldwin’s eldest son Oliver was one of the decade’s angry young men. He had loathed his schooling at Eton, displaying a disdain for authority, discipline and tradition. Yet it was his experience of the Western Front that set him vehemently against ‘the old men’ who had ‘betrayed the young’. After the war Baldwin urged his son to marry the daughter of one of his political allies, but Oliver told his father he was homosexual and moved in with his partner. In 1924, his struggle against his father was expressed in the most emphatic way imaginable when he stood as a Labour candidate at the general election.

If Baldwin was unable to unite his own family, how could he unify a divided country? Any serious attempt to heal national divisions would require more than soothing rhetoric. Yet transmuting words into deeds was not Baldwin’s forte; he was better at setting the tone of government than he was at working out the finer points of policy. Nor were most MPs in his party enthusiastic about extending the role and power of central government. During the war the state had been omnipresent in the economy, but Conservatives believed those circumstances had been exceptional. In peacetime, the state’s job was merely to ‘hold the ring’, allowing manufacturers to introduce their own innovations, employers to bargain with workers and the market to function. ‘All the available evidence indicates,’ one Tory commented, ‘that State enterprise is inherently un-enterprising.’ Another Conservative remarked that central government had its ‘hand in all pockets and its rod on all backs’. Here we see the origins of the market-orientated, anti-state ideology that would dominate Conservative political and economic philosophy in the last quarter of the twentieth century.

Yet despite these unpromising foundations, Baldwin’s government was more active than previous twentiethcentury Tory administrations. That was partly due to the presence in the cabinet of the man Baldwin called ‘the hundred-horsepower mind’. Although Churchill admitted to possessing a ‘limited comprehension of technical matters’, he had been rewarded with the exchequership by Baldwin. The prime minister hoped this onerous appointment would keep Churchill so busy that he would not interfere with other ministers; it was also intended to keep Churchill out of contact with the working classes, who had never forgiven him for sending troops to confront strikers during his time as Liberal home secretary.

In 1925 the chancellor made the momentous decision to return sterling to the gold standard, thereby linking the currency to Britain’s gold reserves. During the war, exchange rate stability and currency convertibility had been abandoned, and Treasury notes had replaced gold coins, since the government had needed to print money to cover its extraordinary costs. But the inevitable consequence of increasing the amount of money in circulation was inflation. Wary of increasing prices, Lloyd George’s coalition had announced that the gold standard would be restored in the mid-Twenties. Churchill, similarly concerned about the potential impact of inflation, decided that the economic conditions were right to fulfil this promise.

Yet in truth the 1925 Gold Standard Act was introduced for political rather than economic reasons. It drew a line under the years of war, intimating a return to the pre-1914 days of peace and plenty that Baldwin loved to evoke. Besides, the Treasury took the view that a failure to return to currency convertibility and exchange rate stability would ‘suggest our nerve had failed’. Churchill decided to fix sterling’s exchange value at the high pre-war rate of $4.86 – a lower exchange rate would imply that Britain’s economy had been surpassed by America in the intervening decade, and that sterling could no longer ‘look the dollar in the face’. Immediately after the passing of the act, the economic weather seemed favourable. Manufacturing production levels started rising slightly and unemployment began to fall. This gave Churchill the confidence to reduce supertax, to the delight of the plutocrats and gentry in his party. Yet he also increased public spending on education, health and housing, in accordance with his previous commitment to a ‘New Liberal’ social state and his current espousal of ‘Tory democracy’.

Churchill was not the only cabinet member whose father had been a proponent of that ‘onenation’ Tory creed. The new minister of health, Neville Chamberlain, was the son of Joseph, a Unionist famous for his commitment to domestic reform. ‘He was a great social reformer,’ Neville remarked of his father, ‘and it was my observance of his deep sympathy with the working classes which inspired me with an ambition to do something in my turn.’ Using the money Churchill made available to the health ministry – then responsible for housing, insurance, pensions and the poor law – the idealistic and indefatigable Chamberlain set about implementing welfare proposals directly inspired by his father’s ‘municipal socialism’. Over the next four years he introduced twentyfive acts that aimed ‘to improve the conditions of the less fortunate’. He united health, insurance and poor law services under one umbrella, extended pensions and insurance, and greatly empowered local government. During the same period Chamberlain established himself as Baldwin’s unofficial deputy; he also excelled in parliament, where his tenacious memory and grasp of policy detail inspired comparisons with Law.

The reserved and methodical Chamberlain admired, but did not entirely approve of, the flamboyant aristocrat over at the Exchequer. While the health minister admitted that Churchill was ‘brilliant’, his ‘amorality’, ‘want of judgement’ and ‘furious advocacy of half-baked ideas’ made him a ‘very dangerous man’. Indeed, in many respects Churchill resembled Lloyd George, whom Chamberlain regarded as a false friend to the British nation, and the tempter of its electorate. For his part, Churchill was impressed by Chamberlain’s proficiency but regarded him as narrow and unadventurous.

Yet while the pair were opposites in terms of character, they often worked in tandem on strategy. Together they also fostered an energetic and ambitious atmosphere within an otherwise undistinguished Tory cabinet. Enterprising policies were formulated, such as the establishment of a public Central Electricity Board to oversee electricity generation, distribution and investment. Although it was in effect a proposal for nationalization, the Tories preferred to call it ‘rationalization’. The resulting 1926 Electricity (Supply) Act would unify 500 separate generating stations under a state monopoly, prompting a fourfold increase in electricity production over the next decade.

Another ambitious act of nationalization was the granting of a Royal Charter, in 1926, for the British Broadcasting Corporation. Run by a director general and a board of governors selected by the prime minister, and funded from licence fees paid by wireless owners, its news bulletins, weather forecasts, children’s programmes, variety shows and coverage of national sporting events and state occasions soon reached every county of England. By the end of its first decade, the BBC would speak to people from every class, as technological advances reduced the price of the wireless.

Baldwin immediately grasped the possibilities offered by the new medium. With his clear syntax, crisp enunciation and evenness of tone, he became a master of the new art of broadcasting. It was said that he would take an audible drag on his pipe just before beginning a talk, so listeners would imagine him sitting next to them as they gathered around the wireless – the modern equivalent of the Victorian hearth. For the duration of Baldwin’s broadcasts, England became the harmonious society that his words invoked.

The most significant bill passed by Baldwin’s government was the 1928 Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act, which extended the franchise to all women over twenty-one, regardless of property ownership, and gave them electoral parity with men. It was a concession to the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, which vigorously campaigned for equality of voting rights throughout the Twenties. Although the bill was a cross-party measure, Baldwin convinced his party that the addition of almost 5 million women to the electorate would not be a threat to its re-election.

On the international as well as the domestic stage, Baldwin’s utterances were often followed up by action. The British Empire Exhibition, which ran from 1924 to 1925 at Wembley in London, was a vast and expensive propaganda exercise. Crammed full of symbols promoting peace and unity within Britain’s imperial territories, its official purpose was ‘to strengthen bonds that bind Mother Country to her Sister States and Daughters’. Along with all the palaces dedicated to British engineering and artistic ingenuity, the military displays and the musical performances, there were pavilions in which each colony or dominion exhibited typical products and traditional artefacts. Visitors could traverse the entire globe in a few hours, via roads named after imperial heroes such as Sir Francis Drake. By displaying a powerful British ‘mother country’ at the centre of a vast empire, the exhibition also aimed to rekindle imperial pride among the English lower classes. This was not an easy task in a post-war period when imperialism was constantly attacked by intellectuals, and when separatist movements within the empire had enjoyed considerable success.

King George made a speech at the opening ceremony that was broadcast to an audience of over 10 million people, the first of many occasions on which the monarch used the medium to promote imperial unity. George expressed the hope that the exhibition would bring lasting benefits both to the empire and ‘to mankind in general’. Concentrating on the former aim, the Tory government promoted self-government within the empire at the 1926 Imperial Conference of British Empire. The meeting reformulated the relationship between Britain, Canada, South Africa and the Irish Free State, defining these countries as ‘autonomous Communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate one to another.’ The imperial parliament no longer determined any aspect of the domestic or external affairs of these dominions, which were decided by their own elected bodies.

In 1926, a relatively liberal viceroy in India was appointed. Lord Irwin, who believed that India should eventually be given dominion status, quickly established a cordial relationship with Mahatma Gandhi. The Indian leader had recently been imprisoned on a charge of sedition, after coordinating a ‘non-cooperation’ campaign during which thousands of Indians boycotted British goods and institutions. Baldwin sensed that nationalism was becoming an irresistible force in India; the selection of Irwin as viceroy acknowledged the situation.

A powerful challenge to Baldwin’s mission of conciliation would arrive soon enough. England’s industrial and manufacturing sectors had long been in decline and exports had fallen further since the post-war slump. Churchill’s decision to return to the gold standard had strengthened sterling and reduced import prices, but this made English exports even more expensive and harder to sell on international markets. In the country’s heavily indebted and antiquated coal, shipbuilding, iron, steel and cotton industries, profits declined and workers were laid off. Arguments inevitably rose about the extent to which the state should intervene in the economy in order to protect industries and those who worked in them. The English population had been radicalized by the experience of war; so had the thinking of economists. John Maynard Keynes argued that the state should take an active role in the peacetime economy and that wages should be determined by a standard of equity rather than by the market. Meanwhile, Labour and the unions enjoyed increasing political power. In such a climate, the Tories could no longer argue that the laws of the market were sacrosanct.

Nevertheless, many producers were adamant that the only way to reduce export prices was to cut wages, while the unions argued that profits could be used to modernize the staple industries. In 1925 mine owners proposed wage reductions of around 13 per cent, and the miners’ union called a strike. The Trades Union Congress was lukewarm about the industrial action but decided to support the miners, partly out of shame for its capitulation on ‘Black Friday’ four years previously and also in the hope that it might bring about a compromise: it would pressure the miners into accepting an accommodation if the prime minister could persuade the mine owners to reduce their demands. Baldwin, whose experience as an industrialist gave him an insight into the dispute, agreed to act as an ‘honest broker’ between the antagonists. While he blamed the ‘stupid and discourteous’ employers for bad management, he also criticized the restrictive practices of the workers. To the dismay of some in the Tory party, Baldwin averted the strike with the help of the TUC; he promised to subsidize the miners’ wages for nine months, during which time a committee would explore ways of increasing the efficiency of the coal industry.

The report recommended reorganizing and partially nationalizing the industry in the long term, while cutting wages in the short term. The mine owners opposed the former recommendations and the miners rejected the latter, so the negotiations were back to square one. To the government’s annoyance, the owners inflamed the situation by proposing increased working hours for the miners, as well as reduced pay. The miners responded by calling another strike, which the TUC was obliged to back. Despite the misgivings of many trade unionists, a ‘general’ strike of miners, railwaymen, transport workers, printers, dockers, ironworkers and steelworkers was announced. MacDonald and his supporters within the Labour party were dismayed, believing progress for the working man could best be achieved through parliament rather than by industrial action or widespread social protest. Baldwin was so horrified by the prospect of a general strike that he took to his bed. When he returned to the cabinet he found it divided between those who, like himself, favoured conciliation, and those who wanted to ‘stand up’ to the unions. Churchill was in the latter party, as was Chamberlain; their view prevailed.

The General Strike began at midnight on 3 May 1926. All union members in the specified trades ceased to work in support of the miners, at considerable cost to themselves and their families. With around 1.75 million workers striking, the economy might have come to a standstill. That it did not was due to the government’s careful planning and the efforts of middleand upper-class volunteers, who drove trains, delivered food and joined the ranks of the police. There were violent confrontations between the police and the strikers, especially in London and in northern cities. To Baldwin’s distress, Churchill did his best to aggravate hostility, branding the strikers ‘the enemy’, demanding the ‘unconditional surrender’ of the ‘subversives’ and proposing to arm any soldiers who confronted them.

Yet despite the episodes of violent class conflict in the General Strike, it is also remembered for the amity displayed between the strikers and the police. In many areas of the country, striking workers helped the police officers deliver food, while elsewhere the opposing sides played football against each other. If this was class war, it was not the sort of bloody conflict that had characterized similar episodes on the Continent. The strike was also remembered with fondness by many middleand upper-class volunteers as a break from routine. Privileged women enjoyed dressing and acting like members of the lower orders. By keeping the economy afloat during the strike, the volunteers were also determined to demonstrate a sense of patriotic duty.

The tendency of volunteers and later historians to highlight the lighter side of the strike obscures the sense of revolution that hung over the country. Baldwin was acutely aware of the threat. He condemned the strike as an anarchic and communist attack on parliamentary democracy and the liberties of the people, since the elected government had opposed the industrial action. The unelected unions, he claimed, were ‘starving the country’ in a bid to ‘force parliament and the community to bend to its will’. Baldwin was in effect forcing the TUC to back down or rise up in rebellion. His arguments were repeatedly aired by the pro-government BBC and by the only national newspaper circulating in large numbers during the strike – the government’s own British Gazette. One of the ironies of the episode was that strike action deprived the workers of what could have been their most effective ally – the press. The TUC could not convincingly answer Baldwin’s accusations of lawlessness, and it lacked the stomach for revolution.

In private, the prime minister pressed for concessions from the unions and the mine owners. George V, meanwhile, publicly expressed sympathy for the miners: ‘Try living on their wages, before you judge them.’ Herbert Samuel, chair of the Royal Commission, then proposed a compromise – that the TUC accept his recommendations for wage cuts on the understanding that his suggestions for the long-term reorganization of the mining industry would be implemented. Weary of the struggle, now in its ninth day, the TUC agreed. Many of the strikers regarded this as unconditional surrender, yet they had no choice but to return to work. The government had won the class war; the workers had lost.

In the aftermath of the TUC’s ‘betrayal’ of the miners, union membership fell sharply. It had become clear that the government could not be pressured by large-scale industrial action into forcing employers to make concessions to employees. After 1927, industrial disputes declined significantly, despite worsening economic conditions. There was a decisive shift of focus in the Labour movement, away from strike action and towards constitutional socialism. Parliament became the main theatre of the class struggle and the Labour party would be the beneficiary. Even so, the strike had demonstrated the power latent in a united working class. It is surely no coincidence that English employers would keep wages at higher levels than those of workers in other European countries.

The General Strike offered incontrovertible evidence, however, of entrenched class divisions in England. It also made a mockery of Baldwin’s government’s assertion that it would bridge the great divide. For while Baldwin had made conciliatory noises during the confrontation, he had deferred to the claims of the haves over the have-nots. He had also been either unwilling or unable fully to restrain Churchill. Armoured cars had been employed by the chancellor to supply food, while peace demonstrations had been violently broken up by the police. If Churchill’s actions during the strike tarnished the government’s reputation, within months it lay in ruins. In 1927 Baldwin introduced a Trade Disputes and Trade Unions Act that outlawed any industrial action aimed at ‘coercing the government’ or ‘inflicting harm on the community’. It also banned all forms of ‘intimidation’ and abolished the unions’ political levy. The bill marked the declaration of a new class war.

20

Get on, or get out

After the General Strike and the Trade Disputes Act, Baldwin now appeared to some contemporaries in a much more calculating light. Instead of reaching out to the working classes as a whole, he seemed to target a segment within their ranks: a group comprising workers who, in Chamberlain’s phrase, had ‘the will and desire to raise themselves to higher and better things’. At its upper end, this segment included the lower-middle-class people who began to acquire houses in the suburbs. These homes were not built by Baldwin’s government but by private companies who made a healthy profit on the sale. While the government cap on rents made rented accommodation relatively cheap, it was not always a feasible option for the lower middle class, especially after the Tory administration stopped building council houses. Meanwhile, Churchill encouraged first-time buying by introducing tax-relief schemes for mortgage payments and by insulating lower-middle-class savings against inflation.

Baldwin’s Conservatives aimed to create the illusion of a property-owning democracy. They could thereby divide the working and lower middle classes between respectable and ratepaying Tory-voting suburbanites, and slumor council-house-dwelling socialist renters, and hoped to convert some of the latter into the former through relocation. Orwell spoke of a plot to turn a vast section of the population into ‘Tories and “yes-men”’, though naturally Baldwin described suburbanization in different terms: ‘Nothing can be more touching, than to see how the working man and woman after generations in the towns will have their tiny bit of garden.’

The ownership of detached or semi-detached property was a badge of status and respectability. The assumption of unprecedented levels of debt in the form of long-term mortgages, meanwhile, forced suburbanites to focus on keeping their jobs. Neither class consciousness nor political activism could flourish. ‘Get on or get out!’ went contemporary Tory slogans. ‘There’s plenty of room at the top.’ Baldwin’s tactics during the General Strike encouraged suburbanites to fear the working classes, while Conservative propaganda depicted Labour MPs as advocates of totalitarian socialism, determined to destroy middle England.

Baldwin’s genius was to claim the suburban lower middle class as the Tory’s natural constituency – no previous Conservative leader had attempted to cultivate its support. By welcoming the middling ranks, Baldwin extended his party’s electoral base and gave it a modern identity. After his second administration, the Tories were no longer exclusively the party of landed or commercial wealth; they were also the party of Daily Mail readers. The ideological links between these disparate groups included a dislike of high taxes, ‘socialism’ and the state, together with a vague but zealous nationalism. Once again, the Conservatives demonstrated their adaptability, and their understanding that superficial change was necessary if the fundamental social and economic order were to survive.

Despite suffering from fatigue, Baldwin was confident going into the general election of 1929. Although it was fought against a backdrop of rising unemployment and in the wake of the General Strike, the Tory leader hoped that those who had opposed the protest would vote Conservative, out of fear and gratitude. During the campaign the Tory party mobilized its superior financial resources and fell back on Law’s old ‘tranquillity’ pitch. Posters of Baldwin, billed as ‘THE MAN YOU CAN TRUST!’ appeared throughout England, emblazoned with ‘Safety First’. The slogan carried an implied warning about the revolutionary legislation a Labour government would introduce.

The Liberal party lacked a broad constituency and required a far more inspiring message. Lloyd George, who had finally replaced Asquith as leader in 1926, came up with a campaign distinguished by audacity, radicalism and flair – precisely the qualities the party had lacked during its decade under ‘Squiffy’. In the aftermath of the General Strike, Lloyd George had drawn on the ideas of John Maynard Keynes and developed an ambitious programme of public works. He now promoted that plan under the slogan ‘We Can Conquer Unemployment’. Abandoning conventional economic wisdom, which saw unemployment as inevitable and held that if a government taxed and spent less, the population would have more, the Liberal leader argued that the government should borrow money to finance public works and increase employment. Since the programme was a rejection of laissez-faire economics, many Liberals met it with hostility and even incomprehension. They lacked Lloyd George’s intuitive insight into economic affairs, as well as his sensitivity to changes in the spirit of the age. His economic judgement had been right when he had introduced bold ‘socialistic’ measures during the war; events in the Thirties would prove that he was also right to advocate public spending in 1929.

Not for the first time, British voters appeared more progressive than most MPs. They responded enthusiastically to Lloyd George’s proposal, and his party secured a quarter of the popular vote at the 1929 election. Yet the bias of the electoral system towards the two main parties meant that this translated into less than 10 per cent of the parliamentary seats. For Lloyd George it was a pyrrhic victory in another sense – most of the Liberal MPs returned to the new parliament were traditional ‘Squiffites’, who condemned Lloyd George’s economic ideas as dangerous. The remaining seats were split fairly evenly between the Tories and Labour, though the latter emerged as the largest party for the first time in history, returning 287 MPs. Compared to their performance in 1924 the Tories won 9 per cent less of the popular vote, but lost 37 per cent of their seats. Baldwin was astonished that an electorate he had enlarged by 8 million people had been so ungrateful. The right of the Tory party, meanwhile, now looked to replace him as leader, with the help of the press barons, Lord Rothermere and Lord Beaverbrook.

The election result proved that voters had accepted Labour as a credible parliamentary party, with enough experience and middle-class MPs to be entrusted with power. MacDonald also reaped the benefits of the failure of the General Strike. He had achieved his two great aims – replacing the Liberals as England’s progressive party and making Labour ‘electable’. Did he now possess the vision to articulate and advance bolder objectives?

Baldwin and Chamberlain thought it would be ‘unsporting’ not to offer Labour the chance to form a minority government, but their ‘sporting’ gesture concealed a pragmatic motive. Baldwin wanted to nip in the bud Churchill’s plans for a coalition between the Tories and his old ally Lloyd George, while Chamberlain believed a minority Labour government would soon disappoint Labour supporters. King George was more than happy to send for his friend MacDonald; the Labour leader accepted the king’s commission, having warned his backbenchers that he would ‘stand no “monkeying”’ from them as prime minister. He assembled a cabinet of moderate politicians, including five men with titles – there would be no question of a Labour government introducing a radical socialist programme. Yet there was something genuinely radical about one of MacDonald’s appointments. Margaret Bondfield, a veteran suffragist, was selected as the new labour minister and became the first ever female cabinet minister. It was, as she declared, ‘part of the great revolution in the position of women’.

21

Crash

At the end of the decade, an economic crisis enveloped the Western world. After the 1921 recession, the value of American stocks had increased by 500 per cent, largely because of unregulated investor speculation. But when the bubble burst in the autumn of 1929, with the value of stocks plummeting by 40 per cent, the majority of ordinary citizens paid the long-term price – in lost jobs, increased taxes and severely reduced public spending.

The Wall Street Crash was the prelude to the largest and longest economic depression of the twentieth century, which would reduce worldwide gross domestic product by 15 per cent and diminish international trade by half. American loans had buoyed up trade in the West, giving other countries the cash to buy goods from the United States; now the loans and the demand for American products dried up. After the autumn of 1929, international prices, income, profits, employment and tax revenues all collapsed. With fewer jobs and less money in circulation, aggregate domestic demand was too low to stimulate weakened Western economies. To compound the problem, sharp deflation encouraged those who had money to hold on to it.

England was ill-prepared for the economic maelstrom that came across the Atlantic. Sterling was chained both to the gold standard and to an unrealistically high exchange rate with the dollar, and the country’s antiquated industries were in terminal decline. As England’s exports had decreased by a quarter over the past two decades, its imports had increased by approximately the same amount, leaving it reliant on international trade. Little had been done by politicians to improve the situation since the last crash, either by modernizing England’s declining industries or by rebalancing the economy through the creation of new ones. MPs expected market forces to provide a solution, but none was forthcoming. Over the next three years industrial production in England decreased by 23 per cent, export prices fell by 50 per cent and foreign trade plummeted by 60 per cent. As a result of the collapse in production and trade, unemployment rose by over 120 per cent during the same period. The picture was even darker in the regions dependent on the old industries. In the northwest, unemployment trebled in the early Thirties, while in the north-east over 70 per cent of adult men found themselves without work. The ‘unemployment problem’ now dominated politics and public debate.

Having been precipitated by one financial crisis, England’s industrial depression was followed by another. Sterling was sold off rapidly on the international markets, and vast amounts of money were withdrawn from the City of London. Much of this had been invested for short-term profit, but the City had accepted it with the risks it entailed. English banks had themselves indulged in speculation for short-term profit, borrowing from French investors at a rate of 2 per cent and lending to Germans at four or five times that amount. While the party lasted City banks did extremely well, but how long could it continue? In 1931 foreign investors suddenly withdrew their money from London, and City banks found themselves owing over £700 million. The Bank of England permitted them to withdraw gold from its reserves while French and American banks lent them £50 million, yet neither move was enough to shore up confidence in the City or in sterling. Foreign governments continued to withdraw around two and a half million pounds’ worth of gold deposits from the Bank of England every day.

The extent and impact of the ‘Great Depression’ was unprecedented; its causes and possible cures were a mystery to virtually all economists and politicians. Like the First World War, there appeared to be an inevitability about its unfolding. Nineteenth-century economic orthodoxy had held that markets would always expand and purchasing power would increase, but the events of the twentieth century had proved that to be false. Yet since no one had anticipated a restriction of demand, governments had no idea how to adapt to it. On the left, prophets of doom were predicting the imminent collapse of capitalism and Western society. Even the pragmatic MacDonald took the quasi-Marxist view that ‘the system under which we live has broken down … as it was bound to’.

Labour’s record during its early months in government did not inspire confidence in its ability to resolve complex problems. Its Coal Mines Act (1930) reduced working hours by just thirty minutes per day, and the miners felt betrayed. If Labour were merely a lesser evil to the Tories, how could the party claim to represent the workers? Labour’s education bill, which tried to raise the school leaving age to fifteen, was voted down, as was its proposal for electoral reform. This act would have replaced first-past-the-post with the alternative vote system, as well as abolishing plural voting and the university constituencies, but the minority government lacked the seats in the Commons to pass the legislation. The party’s one significant domestic achievement was its 1930 Housing Act, which initiated slum clearances and subsidized housebuilding.

As the industrial depression and financial crisis deepened in 1930 and 1931, a plethora of policies was advocated in parliament. Protectionism was once again espoused from the Tory benches, but this time under the euphemistic banner of ‘Empire Free Trade’. The idea was that the colonies and dominions should be ‘encouraged’ to offer preferential tariffs on British goods, though it was not clear how they would be so persuaded. Some on the left meanwhile proposed a reduction of the retirement age to sixty, thus freeing up jobs for younger people; others, such as Ernest Bevin, advocated the devaluation of the currency.

Lloyd George argued that the depression made his public works programme even more urgent. He was right, but it would take Keynes another few years fully to explain the reasons. According to the economist’s argument, published in 1936 under the title of The General Theory of Unemployment, Interest and Money, public works and the reduction of interest rates were the only means to keep people employed and the economy functioning when investment from the private sector was unavailable. ‘Keynesian theory’ would become economic orthodoxy in the late Thirties, but few politicians apart from Lloyd George entertained such ideas at the beginning of the decade.

Yet one young Labour MP was thinking along Keynesian lines at that time. A member of the Economic Advisory Council created by MacDonald in 1930, Oswald Mosley advised the government to adopt an ambitious programme. Two hundred million pounds should be spent on extensive public works, the availability of credit ought to be increased, tariffs should be introduced and early retirement should be encouraged. Much of the banking and industrial sectors would have to be brought under state control, while a government body would ‘rationalize’ manufacturing, offer advice and oversee research. The crisis, Mosley said, had presented Labour with a unique opportunity to remodel the economy along centralized lines.

This was all too radical for Philip Snowden. The Labour chancellor was too attached to free trade and balanced budgets to approve such plans, while MacDonald did not have the imagination or the desire to overrule him. Despite styling themselves as ‘socialists’, neither Snowden nor MacDonald believed there was an effective alternative to the capitalist system; at most that ideology might be adjusted in the interest of workers, though even modest improvements would have to wait for more propitious economic circumstances. Besides, the pair were politicians, not economists, and it was their overriding aim to demonstrate Labour’s credibility to the electorate; the promotion of extravagant economic schemes that were unlikely to pass through parliament would not further that. It was far better to err on the side of safety and try to consolidate the electoral gains Labour had made under their leadership.

The rejection of Mosley’s proposal deprived Labour of his ideas and dynamism; he resigned before he could be expelled from the party for challenging the leadership. It also left the administration with no alternative but to fall back on the old economic orthodoxies, and on the idea of cross-party cooperation. After consulting the other party leaders and financial experts in the City and the Treasury, Snowden decided against significantly raising taxes or borrowing money, instead resolving to reduce government spending. The chancellor then created two committees to advise him on where the cuts should come. Expenditure on unemployment insurance made up a substantial segment of public spending and had risen from £12 million in 1928 to £125 million in 1932. It was inevitable that Snowden’s committees would recommend that unemployment relief be cut. In the event, they suggested total cuts of £96 million, in order to ‘save’ the country from a £120 million deficit, with most of the savings coming from a 20 per cent reduction in unemployment benefit.

The alarmist nature of the committee reports encouraged the further flight of investment from the City. The Treasury told the government that its inability to balance the budget was the problem, and urged it to implement the recommended cuts. The national debt was, they claimed, undermining international confidence in England’s ability to maintain its currency at its high valuation. If there were a run on the pound, the Bank of England’s reserves would not be sufficient to maintain the all-important gold standard. ‘To go off the gold standard,’ one banker said, ‘for a nation that depends so much on its credit would be a major disaster.’ Like the navy or the empire, the gold standard was a symbol of the country’s robustness; leaving it would be to renounce its status as a great power.

Over the ensuing days City experts and Treasury officials attempted to frighten the Labour government – sterling might, they warned, go under any day. After a few meetings, Snowden and MacDonald were thoroughly alarmed. Both were persuaded that anarchy would result if foreign confidence in sterling were not restored quickly and the gold standard maintained; both were convinced that reducing government expenditure on unemployment was the key to resolving the financial crisis. In accepting these arguments, Snowden and MacDonald also accepted Labour’s responsibility not just for solving the crisis but also for provoking it.

MacDonald told his cabinet he was ‘absolutely satisfied’ that economies on unemployment insurance payments were the only way to shore up confidence. Yet how could Labour ministers implement a policy that was, as MacDonald himself admitted, a ‘negation of everything that the party stood for’? After an intense debate, half of the cabinet ministers declared themselves against any reduction in unemployment benefit. The bankers, however, said that the Labour government’s inaction ‘would not do’, and Neville Chamberlain – an influential go-between for the City and the government – agreed. A stalemate ensued, and the cabinet increasingly felt it would have to resign.

When MacDonald explained the situation to King George, the monarch decided to consult the other party leaders. He and Herbert Samuel (standing in as Liberal leader for the sick Lloyd George) reached the conclusion that, since MacDonald had failed to secure support for the required cuts, the best alternative would be a ‘National Government’ composed of the three parties. MacDonald should remain as prime minister, because swingeing cuts would seem more palatable to the people if made by a Labour prime minister, and also to elicit Labour’s support for the coalition. The king persuaded Baldwin of the efficacy of the idea, before asking his old friend MacDonald to lead a coalition in order to resolve the national emergency. After some deliberation, MacDonald assented, before calling a meeting of his cabinet. Rather than announcing the government’s resignation, the policy which had been agreed upon, MacDonald informed them he would instead be forming a new emergency coalition to which only three of them were invited.

The motives of the protagonists in this episode have been scrutinized over the years. The king undoubtedly exercised extraordinary power by effectively nominating a prime minister and a government without consulting either parliament or the country, but there is no evidence to suggest that he did so in order to end Labour’s tenure in office. MacDonald has been accused of putting himself before a party that he no longer loved, and it is true that he had become increasingly alienated from the revolutionary and trade unionist elements in his party. Even so, the Labour leader appears to have convinced himself that he was making a genuine renunciation by sacrificing his government, and perhaps his own political career. It should also be remembered that everyone involved saw the National Government as temporary and established for the single purpose of averting a national emergency. ‘When that purpose is achieved,’ the king explained, after ‘about five weeks, the political parties will resume their respective positions’, and an election would follow. This assurance enabled Baldwin to persuade Tory MPs to participate in the National Government for which they felt little enthusiasm.

But how could MacDonald bring his outraged party with him? Apart from three Labour ministers who would enter the new ten-man coalition cabinet, and eight backbenchers, all of the Labour MPs vehemently opposed the National Government. ‘They choose the easy path of irresponsibility,’ remarked MacDonald, ‘and leave the burdens to others.’ Within the wider Labour movement, he and Snowden were vilified as ‘traitors’ – they had betrayed their colleagues, their party and democracy itself by making an unconstitutional deal behind closed doors with an unelected monarch. The pair were also derided as the dupes of the bankers, who had, it was said, exaggerated the financial crisis in order to pass anti-working-class legislation and bring down the Labour government. Long-standing suspicions about MacDonald were now openly expressed. The man who had wanted Labour to replace the Liberals had become a Liberal himself; ‘Gentleman Mac’ had sold his comrades for praise in the right-wing press and access to high society.

Baldwin and MacDonald were both men of moderation who had shifted their parties towards the centre ground of politics. They shared a loathing of Lloyd George and a determination to keep him out of Downing Street. They now formed a solid, centrist coalition, which aimed to insulate the country from political extremism at a time of economic and social turmoil. Yet they also insulated their government from innovative ideas on the left and the right, which might have improved the precarious economic situation. Labour proposed the nationalization of the banks, the transport system, the staple industries and land, while on the right the rising Tory Harold Macmillan advocated a planned economy. Lloyd George, meanwhile, continued to espouse a proto-Keynesian programme of public works. But Baldwin and MacDonald dismissed these radical suggestions.

Snowden’s budget of September 1931 drastically reduced government spending, cutting unemployment payments and public sector wages. It was opposed by 90 per cent of Labour MPs and the vast majority of union members, who were now irrevocably cut off from their former leaders. It was also attacked by civil service employees, 20,000 of whom organized a rally to protest against the government. The chancellor’s critics predicted his cuts would not restore confidence in either sterling or in the City, and they were right – foreign investors continued to sell the former and withdraw money from the latter. The Bank of England was now obliged to use large amounts of its gold to shore up sterling. To add to the sense of emergency, part of the navy went on strike in protest at the proposed 25 per cent cut to sailors’ wages.

On 21 September 1931, events forced the National Government to announce that no public sector pay cuts would exceed 10 per cent and Britain would leave the gold standard. Sterling was allowed to float freely against other currencies, and its value ceased to be linked to the amount of money the country possessed. It also meant that a government formed for the purpose of maintaining the gold standard had now abandoned it. ‘For me,’ wrote the novelist Alec Waugh, ‘as for most born before 1910, the announcement … was the biggest shock that we had known.’

But the sky did not fall, and nor did the economy. Sterling dropped by around 25 per cent in value, but then stabilized: it was weaker but steadier, and its steadiness revived investor confidence. Investors were also reassured by the presence of Baldwin and Chamberlain in the cabinet. Britain’s devalued currency, meanwhile, held out the promise of lower export prices and low interest rates, providing further cause for optimism. Going off the gold standard thus ended the currency crisis, where cutting unemployment benefit had had little or no positive effect. The bankers and the Treasury had been wrong all along, but the unemployed and the Labour government had paid the price.

In leaving the gold standard, the National Government lost its raison d’être, but gained a new one – to stabilize the new floating sterling. The Conservatives believed the currency could best be steadied by the introduction of a tariff programme; they demanded a general election, in order to secure a popular mandate for the policy. But they were happy to go to the country as part of a MacDonald-led National Government, since the king favoured its continuance. Besides, the Labour party would be isolated and vulnerable in its opposition to a cross-party coalition. ‘The insidious doctrines of class warfare cannot make headway against the general desire for national cooperation,’ Baldwin commented. ‘The great thing is to give socialism a really smashing defeat.’ Here was the real Tory agenda.

Yet MacDonald and the free-trade Liberals in the coalition were uncomfortable with the idea of promoting protectionism. The prime minister was also reluctant to campaign against the party he had helped to build. Nevertheless, Chamberlain correctly predicted that MacDonald would find the lure of power too strong to resist. Not even the cautionary tale provided by Lloyd George’s fall from the leadership of a national coalition in 1922 could dissuade MacDonald from agreeing. In any case, Labour left their former leader little choice but to join the National Government, as they expelled him from the party.

When a general election was called, the MacDonald splinter group, ‘National Labour’, broke away from the bulk of the Labour party. The Liberal party, meanwhile, was split three ways. The ‘Liberals’ were pro-coalition but anti-protection and the ‘National Liberals’ favoured both, while neither was palatable to Lloyd George’s ‘Independents’. Though the party-political situation was confusing, there was nothing unclear about the messages the Tories and Labour tried to communicate to the electorate. With the help of their friends in the press, the Conservatives blamed Labour for causing the economic crisis and claimed a new Labour government would give people’s savings to idlers on the dole. Labour, meanwhile, blamed the bankers for the crisis and vilified MacDonald, whose portrait at the party’s London offices was turned to face the wall. In response MacDonald and Snowden effectively bade farewell to Labour by describing its election programme as ‘Bolshevism run mad’.

MacDonald received his mandate, as the National Government won over 60 per cent of the vote and returned 521 MPs to the new parliament. The real victory, however, belonged to the Conservatives, who claimed 473 of the government’s seats. The vast majority of the middle classes, and over 50 per cent of the working class and the female electorate, had voted Tory. Baldwin had proved to his party that his dream of a property-owning democracy could be turned into a reality. He had also convinced many voters that a spendthrift ‘socialist’ government had caused the country’s economic malaise. Labour lost 235 seats and were reduced to a mere fifty-two MPs, an abysmal result that was probably also a judgement by some sections of the working class on the party’s poor record in office. On the other hand, their massive reduction in seats could also be attributed to the bias of the electoral system – the party’s share of the popular vote only decreased by 6 per cent. It was the middle classes, more than the workers, who had turned away from Labour. They also turned away from the Liberals, which was hardly surprising since the bulk now supported a Tory-dominated coalition. The election of 1931 marked the extinction of the great party of Gladstone and Lloyd George. For the rest of the century, it would be a simple fight between the Tories and Labour. And for the foreseeable future, there was no doubt which party would win. England was a Tory country of the south as opposed to the north, of the classes rather than of the masses.

Within the National Government the Liberals were now dispensable, while Snowden could be ignored. MacDonald was no longer even a figurehead but merely a cipher. Once more, there were clear parallels with the 1918 election, which gave Lloyd George office and the Conservatives power. Yet there was also an obvious difference: even fettered and outnumbered, Lloyd George had been an irrepressible and imperious leader; MacDonald, in contrast, was a spent force. The absence of dynamism at the heart of government would have devastating consequences for England, as would the lack of a substantial parliamentary opposition for the Tories. For the next eight or nine years the Conservatives would have everything their own way.

The Tories soon demonstrated their dominance in the coalition. Chamberlain, who replaced Snowden as chancellor, introduced a number of protectionist measures, despite the disapproval of some Liberals in the cabinet. At first he implemented import tariffs with the excuse of balancing trade; but then he did so more openly and paid tribute to his father, who had first espoused the protectionist cause. A general tariff of 10 per cent was imposed, while empire goods were exempted. The Tory’s grand design was a self-sufficient empire separated from the rest of the world by imperial preference, just as Chamberlain’s father had envisaged. The colonies and dominions would provide the ‘mother country’ with food and raw materials, as well as a market for its manufactured goods.

Yet there were a number of problems with the policy. The countries that comprised the empire had industries of their own, which they naturally wished to protect. They had also suffered during the recent crash, and could hardly afford English exports. Moreover, after the successes of the Irish and Indian opposition to direct British rule, independence was in the air. In the end, the colonies and dominions agreed to increase tariffs on imports from other countries, but left tariffs on British imports at their former high level. The Tariff Reform scheme – which Tories had promoted over the previous three decades – turned out to have a minimal impact on the economy. With the price of its goods too high, English exports increased only slightly. Critics of protectionism suggested that the Tories were not so much attuned to economic reality as in thrall to ideology.

The damp squib of Tory protectionism did, however, have significant political consequences. It alienated the free-trade Liberals in the government, and MacDonald, who was himself unhappy about the policy, struggled to keep them on side. Desperate to maintain unity, he reminded the Tories that they had promised to participate in a coalition. His appeal was not heeded, and when the chancellor refused to dilute his protectionist policies, the free-trading Liberals left the administration, along with Snowden. MacDonald was now even more painfully aware of his position as leader of a de facto Tory government; he became increasingly anxious, ill and enfeebled. The pro-protectionist ‘National Liberal’ faction, meanwhile, remained in the government and would eventually merge with the Conservative party. The Tories absorbed the right wing of the Liberal party, just as Labour had absorbed the left.

The Conservatives now finally accepted protectionism as a permanent aspect of the modern economy. They proceeded to take London’s public transport into public ownership, and would later nationalize coal royalties. Chamberlain also ‘rationalized’ aspects of the agricultural sector, establishing marketing boards that guaranteed high prices for farmers and supporting them with lavish subsidies. The chancellor’s ‘socialist’ approach to the ‘shires’, which were after all the Tories’ traditional heartland, is less surprising than it first appears. It was as natural for Chamberlain to please the landowners and farmers as it was for him to reduce assistance to those who had lost their jobs – which he now proceeded to do, using the old argument that cuts would restore ‘confidence’ in the pound. There would be no ‘socialist’ planning for the unemployed.

22

The rituals of suburbia

None of the chancellor’s measures had any great impact on the economy; far more influential was the policy that the Tory party had fiercely opposed – that of abandoning the gold standard. The weaker pound meant that English exports were more competitively priced; as global trade slowly picked up, they started to sell again on the international market. The difficulty of devaluation was that, in normal circumstances, the price of imports was bound to increase; but these were not normal times. The collapse of commodity prices after 1929 ensured that England’s international payments became balanced again, while production increased significantly. Unemployment started to fall – slightly at first but then steadily, decreasing to 10 per cent in 1937. Naturally, the Tory chancellor claimed all the credit.

Abandoning the gold standard also meant that the currency no longer needed to be supported by high interest rates. The base rate of interest was reduced to approximately 2 per cent – it had been set at around 5 per cent throughout the Twenties. This made borrowing cheap, while also encouraging investment and spending. Although the Tory-dominated National Government was averse to borrowing and spending on public works, private investors and businesses took up the role. There was a housebuilding boom, which saw 40 per cent more houses built in 1934 than in 1929; well over 2 million houses were constructed by the end of the decade. For the first time in its history, England contained more houses than families. Most of the new dwellings were constructed in the suburbs of towns and cities in the south and the Midlands, or in the ‘rural’ suburbs of existing suburbs. Others were erected along the roads between towns, in a so-called ‘ribbon development’. Around London, Slough, Hayes, Kenton, Uxbridge, Hillingdon, Feltham and Kingsbury were all greatly enlarged; geographers compared the capital to a giant octopus stretching its tentacles into the countryside. Such was the rate of expansion that various movements for the preservation of open space and the countryside were established, while criticism of suburban ‘sprawl’ was widespread. Baldwin – one of the architects of the mess – lamented the destruction of the countryside, yet took no practical steps to stop it.

The housing boom was funded by private investment, since the National Government had terminated the housebuilding programme Labour had tried to revive with its 1930 Housing Act. With building regulations and restrictions minimal, and money cheap, construction companies borrowed to buy up land, which was then quickly covered with houses. Over the interwar period, private firms built over 600,000 houses in London, while local authorities subsidized the construction of only 150,000 of the capital’s new homes.

With interest rates low, lower-middleand upper-working-class people could afford new homes. ‘Cheap’ houses were made available to those on regular wages by building societies such as Halifax and Woolwich that had flourished after the Wall Street Crash. Eager to lend from their overflowing reserves, the building societies reduced the deposit they demanded from prospective buyers to as little as 2 per cent. A new London house that cost £800 could be acquired with a deposit of £25, with the remaining debt paid off at an interest rate of 3 per cent; the government also offered tax relief on interest payments. Since there was little council housing available, the lower middle and upper working classes were compelled to take on debt to purchase houses. By the late Thirties, clerks, shopkeepers, foremen, postal workers, transport workers and teachers owned property, as did a fifth of manual workers. By 1938, 4 million people possessed a house, compared to less than 1 million fifteen years before. Thus the Tories continued to create a vast constituency of indebted suburbanites.

The new homes were filled with furniture and appliances. Goods acquired on ‘hire purchase’ would be delivered by an anonymous van, to spare the blushes of those who did not wish their neighbours to know they had bought them ‘on tick’. Yet many families possessed enough money to buy goods without having to borrow it, despite – or perhaps because of – the economic depression. The great paradox of the crisis, and the chief reason the English economy was able to recover from it, was that it left many people with more money in their pockets. For while wages had been falling since 1929, the purchasing power of those wages increased as a result of plummeting prices. Real wages were 10 per cent higher in the midst of the depression than they had been before it, and the margin of income left over after a family’s basic needs had been met was consequently larger. In 1938 a British family had double the income of a family in 1914, in real terms, and, with the size of families decreasing, income per head was almost 70 per cent higher. Increased family income, at a time when money could be borrowed cheaply, funded a national spending spree on houses, household goods and services.

The sudden emergence of a domestic consumer market in England meant that manufacturing and tertiary industries flourished, and new mass production processes enabled manufacturers to meet the increased demand. The cost of raw materials was now lower, as was the cost of the unskilled labour force required to oversee the machines, which kept prices down. The chemical industry was one of the strongest performers in the period. It produced pharmaceutical goods, fertilizers, artificial fibres for synthetic clothes, and plastics such as Bakelite, which were used for countless household appliances. The car industry also expanded rapidly, with assembly-line mass production turning out over half a million cars annually by 1937. Prices decreased as the decade went on, and by 1939 over 2 million British people owned private cars. In Longbridge and Oxford, Austin and Morris motors provided employment for thousands of people, whose wages could be spent on more goods, thus further stimulating the economy.

The greatest boom industry of the Thirties, however, was the electrical industry in its widest sense – electrical appliances, electrical engineering, and the production and distribution of electricity itself. Industrial demand for electricity was high since the new factory machines were run on this relatively new form of energy. Domestic demand was also high, with three-quarters of houses wired up for electricity by the end of the Thirties (compared to only 6 per cent in 1920). The price of electricity had decreased significantly since the Twenties, too, as a result of technological advancement and a fall in coal prices.

Baldwin, an experienced industrialist, understood that a new industrial revolution was taking place, in which the staple export industries of the former industrial revolution were being superseded by new industries serving the home market (over 80 per cent of English cars, for example, were bought in England). The Tory leader hoped that the expansion of the new trades would absorb the displacement of labour from the depressed heavy industries – that jobless miners and shipbuilders would become wireless technicians and electrical engineers. However, Baldwin did not indicate how the government would facilitate this ‘transition’, which would involve retraining and the relocation of countless communities in the north of England.

Other observers were more sceptical about the new industrial utopia. Charlie Chaplin’s film Modern Times (1936) was a satire ‘about the way life is being standardized, and men turned into machines’. In the film, Chaplin’s tramp persona is set to work on an ever-accelerating factory assembly line, suffering physical injury and a nervous breakdown as he struggles to keep pace with the vast and voracious machine. It was as though modern technology was using humans to manufacture a new race of demented robots.

Whether they were built for sale or rent, the suburban houses of the Twenties and Thirties tended to be of the uniform semi-detached variety. They were easily distinguishable from their Edwardian prototypes by their external features. They had roof tiles instead of slates and ‘Tudorbethan’ timbers, together with unadorned stucco or pebbledash walls. Along with their pastiche of older architectural styles, half-timber gables, leaded lights and inglenooks gave them a ‘rustic’ appearance.

To enhance the illusion that the suburbs were in the countryside, every house had a front and back garden. ‘It is amazing,’ commented a journalist, ‘how soon families, many of whom had never had a garden before, turn the rough land surrounding their new houses into beautiful gardens. In summer they are ablaze with colour.’ The front garden often had a privet hedge, to increase privacy and reduce noise. The back garden sometimes contained a shed or a greenhouse and was surrounded by a fence. This was the English family’s hallowed plot of land, the city dressed up in country clothes. The names of the new houses and streets contributed to the masquerade: ‘The Myrtles’ was situated in Meadow Rise, while ‘Acacia Villa’ stood in Fir Tree Crescent. The countrified, nostalgic architecture of the suburbs set the tone of Baldwin’s England.

For those who moved to the suburbs from the slums, the most novel feature of their new houses was an indoor bathroom, often upstairs. There would also typically be three bedrooms on the upper floor, with two reception rooms and a kitchen downstairs. Wired for electricity and supplied with hot water, the houses were well lit, with standard lamps throughout. There were sockets in every room for electrical appliances: wirelesses, gramophones, electric hairdryers, vacuum cleaners and electric sewing machines. The kitchen had the most sockets to accommodate toasters, ovens, electric irons, kettles, washing machines and refrigerators. These kitchen gadgets were ‘labour-saving’ – designed for families without domestic servants, where the woman of the house oversaw its management and maintenance.

The new ‘semis’ were referred to as ‘containers’ for the new mass-produced consumer goods. Stainless steel cutlery was stored in the kitchen drawers, while plastic ornaments were displayed on the mantelpiece in the lounge. That ‘living room’ was often crowded with mass-produced furniture: three-piece suites with a ‘jazzy’ striped design, ‘pouffes’, wooden bookcases, and dining tables with chairs of limed oak. Pastel shades were generally favoured for the walls of the downstairs rooms, while bolder and darker colours were not uncommon in the smaller upstairs rooms. Everything was practical, standardized, time-saving and efficient.

If the family possessed a car, it would be parked in the garage or outside in the street. Car owners, however, were a minority in the suburbs; most travelled by means of public services. There was the electric ‘trolley bus’, more comfortable and quieter than the ‘proletarian’ electric tram, which shrieked its way along the streets. The motor buses of the General Omnibus Company were also indispensable to those who lived just beyond the ever-expanding spider’s web of railways that spread out from England’s cities.

The daily commute from the suburbs was often a near-silent process. Men in dark hats and suits would quietly and neatly arrange themselves along train or underground platforms, or in the queue at the bus stop. Most buried their heads in newspapers and gave no more than a slight nod of greeting to the familiar faces around them. Those who did talk tended to speak in low tones and to stick to uncontroversial subjects, such as the weather, sport or gardening. Carriages were often full, but standing passengers did their utmost to avoid physical contact. Journeys passed without incident, but also without interest.

Train stations and bus stops were located next to the suburban shopping parade, which invariably offered the six essential trades of the period: a grocer’s, greengrocer’s, butcher’s, baker’s, dairy and a newsagent, tobacconist or confectioner, along with a post office. In mock Tudor style and with flats above the shops, these parades were meant to be the focal point of the suburban ‘community’, though they lacked the vibrant atmosphere of older urban markets. The shops were grouped together in order to isolate them from the surrounding residential streets, since tradespeople were unwelcome in addresses that aspired to respectability. The appetite for shopping among suburbanites was so great that it could not always be satisfied by the local shops or door-to-door salesmen. When suburban consumers demanded more, they headed to the high streets of the town or city.

These high streets were rapidly being colonized by ‘chains’ that purveyed mass-produced goods. Sainsbury’s, C&A, Littlewoods, Home & Colonial and Boots the Chemist were supplanting local, family-owned shops. In 1929, Marks & Spencer had a turnover of £2 million; a decade later it generated £23 million in its 250 countrywide stores. The ‘chains’ borrowed huge amounts of money and bought cheap, mass-produced, standardized goods from new English industries and from overseas. They had small profit margins but achieved sizeable returns because of their exceptionally large turnovers – a testimony to high domestic demand. The ‘chains’ seemed to be miracles of efficient business management, while customers marvelled at the novel shopping experience they offered. No assistants goaded them into buying a particular product; they were left to browse the well-stocked aisles themselves, comparing quality and prices for as long as they liked, before making up their own minds. Shoppers could now buy every item on their shopping list within a single store, a striking everyday example of the efficiency espoused by politicians in the period.

Yet not everyone was enthusiastic about the advent of the chain stores. As local shops closed across the country, to be replaced by yet another Woolworths, English towns began to look alike. Moreover, as locally sourced products were replaced in the new stores by mass-produced goods from abroad, local producers complained about the loss of business, while consumers noticed a significant reduction in quality.

The food sold by chain stores was of the mass-produced variety, too. Colourful and tasty comfort foods became available to the masses: custard, jelly, ice cream, blancmange, sponge cakes and chocolate eggs were all favourites of the period. A generation that had experienced wartime rationing at last had an opportunity to indulge its sweet tooth, while savoury tastes could also be satisfied with Marmite, Bovril and Smith’s crisps. Breakfast cereals arrived on the shelves of the chain stores, with Grape-Nuts, porridge oats, Kellogg’s Corn Flakes and Shredded Wheat among the most popular. Most of the food sold in the new stores, however, came in tins – sardines, salmon, peaches, peas, pears, pilchards and Spam. Tinned food might have been abhorrent to the higher classes, but it was a blessing to those lower down the social scale, and the tin opener became indispensable in most suburban kitchens. Many of the tins were imported from abroad, along with much of the fresh food, including eggs and tomatoes. While the food revolution of the period was a blow to native producers and generally involved a reduction in both quality and freshness, the increase in consumer choice was undeniable. An older generation which had grown up with an unvaried and often meagre diet was astonished to be now able to purchase frozen meat and exotic fruit in tins, and at reasonable prices.

Evenings in the suburbs came round quickly in the Thirties. Working hours had been reduced from sixty hours per week to around fifty, largely thanks to the pressure of the unions, and work on a Saturday generally finished at lunchtime. This meant more evening leisure time, but the remoteness of many suburbs from urban centres and their lack of public spaces and venues encouraged people to stay in. Among the two most popular suburban pastimes were gardening and ‘having a read of the newspaper’.

National dailies and local ‘rags’ found their way onto most suburban doormats each morning. The working man of the house would skim these papers at breakfast and peruse them with care at night (when he would also do the crossword, now a daily feature of newspapers). The total circulation of national dailies exceeded 10 million in the Thirties. By the end of the decade the Daily Express sold two and a half million copies per day, and the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror one and a half million each. These papers offered entertainment and accounts of the lives of sports and film celebrities, while older publications such as The Times, the Manchester Guardian and the Morning Post were the serious purveyors of news, commentary and enlightenment. The high circulation of the Express, Mail and Mirror brought vast cultural and political influence, as well as wealth, to press barons such as Lord Beaverbrook and Lord Rothermere. Despite their earlier misgivings about Baldwin, the barons helped him consolidate the support of the Conservativevoting suburban lower middle class, and to identify the views of this new class with public opinion and the national interest.

Newspapers brought an avalanche of advertisements into suburban homes; as a result, advertising played a crucial role in stimulating the demand-driven consumer boom of the period. Manufacturers and retailers now spent over £60 million on newspaper advertising annually, with the heaviest investors including department stores and producers of cosmetics, cigarettes, medicines and processed foods. Flourishing publicity firms came up with catchy slogans for their products, such as ‘Player’s Please’ and ‘Friday night is Amami night’.

This second advertisement for shampoo was aimed at young women, a new and burgeoning market for advertisers. A particular form of femininity was being promoted, perhaps to counter the effect of large-scale female employment in the new light industries. In the Thirties, women generally dressed more conservatively than their flapper predecessors, with longer, tighter dresses emphasizing the ‘feminine’ figure. Although Edwardian heaviness had been banished from women’s wardrobes forever, shoulders were now broader and waists were coming back. Hair became longer, softer and curlier across the decade, while make-up became heavier and more widespread. By 1939, 90 per cent of women under thirty regularly used lipstick, powder, mascara and rouge.

Along with the more traditional look, traditional gender divisions returned. While women might work immediately after they left school, their ultimate destiny was to marry, have a family and settle down. Housewifery was regarded by many as the ideal career for women; for many it was the only option, since their professional progress was still hindered by the marriage bar. The housewife brought up the children and managed the house, with the help of the new electrical appliances. New ‘women’s magazines’, such as Woman and Woman’s Own, instructed women on how to run a household, while urging them to ‘be the junior partner’ within their marriages. As a result of propaganda and economic pressures, English women were forced back into the home in the Thirties. It is telling that it was not uncommon for the rooms in new suburban houses to be separated along gender lines, with the male head of the household having access to a private study, while the housewife might occupy the morning room. It is unsurprising that many housewives complained of boredom and fatigue and longed to return to work. Some were disappointed that, having won the right to vote, they lacked the political power to improve their lot.

Lonely suburban women spent a great deal of time reading books, as did the men after work. The bookshelves of the new ‘semis’ were often stocked with the latest publications. ‘Penguin’ fictions and the ‘Pelican’ educational series were launched in the late Thirties for only sixpence a book, while the ‘Reader’s Library’ hardback classics could be bought cheaply from Woolworths. By the end of the decade, book sales increased to 7 million per year. Books could also be borrowed from libraries, with 247 million loaned in 1939. The representatives of ‘circulating libraries’ would visit the suburbs on their bikes. ‘A romance or a detective story?’ they would ask young mothers, since these were the most popular genres among that demographic. Where Mills & Boon ruled the romance genre, Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers dominated detective fiction, providing suburban readers with intriguing puzzles in exotic or aristocratic settings. Gangster novels, meanwhile, transported countless male readers to New York, while thrillers tapped into their unconscious fears about foreign invasion and war.

An alternative form of suburban home entertainment was provided by the radio. When the family came together after dinner, it was often around the wireless, to listen to a news broadcast or a light entertainment programme. By the end of the Thirties, compact sets could be purchased for as little as £5, which meant that every suburban family, and even some workingclass households, could afford them. Where workingclass families tended to leave the wireless on to provide background noise, the middle classes switched selected programmes on and off and listened intently. In the Thirties listeners had access to continental stations such as Radio Luxembourg, which were financed by advertising and broadcast popular music as well as comedy shows. This ‘American-style’ commercial fare was less restricted than the typical offerings of the BBC, where earnest, lengthy highbrow programmes and public-school accents dominated. While the BBC alienated many workingclass listeners, the aspiring suburban classes tuned in faithfully. Suburban families also listened to music on the gramophone, which had become cheaper and smaller since the Twenties, while 6-inch records were now available from Woolworths for sixpence. Popular songs of the period included ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen’ and ‘Boomps-A-Daisy’, while among the most successful classical composers were Ralph Vaughan Williams and Edward Elgar.

In the wealthier suburbs, ‘entertaining’ would take place in the evenings, but social gatherings elsewhere would usually be divided by gender. Small groups of women would get together to talk over a ‘nice cup of tea’ in the afternoon, while men might meet in the evenings for a game of cards or to listen to music. Talk did not flourish among the male population of the English suburbs, some of whom confessed to their ‘difficulties with English’ as well as a certain ‘terror of social intercourse’.

Contact between people living in the same suburb or street was limited. Neighbours were more likely to be heard than seen, since their radios or gramophones were audible through badly insulated party walls. The asocial lifestyle of the suburbs came as a disappointment to recent arrivals from rural or inner-city areas; they disliked the way their new neighbours just nodded when they happened to meet them. Some complained that the old social intimacy of the city doorstep was broken by the gardens and the distance between houses. Suburban living made the English a more private people, who saw their home lives as separate from the public spheres of work and politics. The weakening of class and political consciousness was an inevitable consequence.

Novelists satirized the ‘sterile’ suburbs, whose inhabitants were ‘shallow’ and ‘staid’. George Orwell was probably their most ardent critic. ‘To turn into the typical bowler-hatted sneak … To settle down, to Make Good, to sell your soul for a villa and an aspidistra!’ That, according to the hero of Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), was the appalling fate of suburbanites. Other intellectuals saw England’s spreading suburbia as a symbol of national decline – an outward-looking country that still possessed the largest empire the world had ever known had become private, provincial and insular. A nation of gardeners and housewives seemed ill-equipped to carry out the global role England had once assumed, or to take up the torch of activism from the suffragettes and the trade unionist radicals who had preceded them. But for many suburbanites, despite their lack of neighbourliness, the suburbs represented a definite improvement on the countryside or the crowded inner-city slums. Besides, most people had little choice in the matter of where to live, so they had to flourish in the outer cities. As one suburban housewife put it, ‘this was their life now and they weren’t going to let it go’.

23

Now we can have some fun

Public houses had provided meeting points in traditional urban and rural communities, but far fewer of them were built in the new suburbs. In Becontree there were only five pubs for over 110,000 inhabitants; on some estates they were prohibited altogether. The few that were built struck contemporaries as uninviting. In some establishments drinks had to be ordered from waiters in bow ties and consumed when seated. These were not the sort of places you could casually visit after work for a few pints and a chat while standing at the bar. Unsurprisingly, beer sales fell by a half and spirits by a third in the Thirties, compared to pre-war levels.

The cinema was more attractive to suburbanites as a place of entertainment, in part perhaps because it offered a kind of privacy. Films had been championed by the urban working class on their arrival in wartime England, and the small city nickelodeons and picture palaces of those years had been predominantly proletarian institutions. Yet as the Twenties progressed, the cinema had gradually become a respectable pastime: for the first time in history, a distinctly workingclass entertainment conquered the middle classes. The disappearance of snobbery towards the silver screen coincided with the advent of synchronized soundtracks, colour and the ‘talkies’ towards the end of the Twenties.

The talkies were at first billed as ‘All Talking, All Singing, All Dancing’ films, and some of the most popular early productions were spectacular musicals, such as those starring Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. Other stars of the early cinema included Clara Bow, Greta Garbo and Errol Flynn, while Disney’s Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck became household names among English children. Among the most popular genres of the Thirties were romances in exotic settings and Westerns, which depicted the life of frontier towns. Were these newly established American settlements a mirror image of English suburbia, or a free-spirited reproach to it?

Virtually all the films came from the United States, despite the introduction of protectionist Tory legislation to encourage the domestic industry. In comparison with American films, English productions were seen as stagy, lacking in action, and overpopulated by the middle and upper classes. Two of the greatest geniuses of cinema were, however, English: Charlie Chaplin and the director Alfred Hitchcock. Both men were from London but worked in the United States by the end of the Thirties, creating masterpieces that manifested the energy and ingenuity as well as the range and exuberance of the new art form.

Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (1935) begins, and ends, in a shabby London music hall. It is a world that is about to be swept away, as people sensed at the time. Although it was based on a novel by John Buchan that had been published twenty years before, Hitchcock’s film has a contemporary setting and touches the hidden anxieties of mid-Thirties England. Apprehension for the future seems to cast shadows over everything. Nothing in the film feels real or solid; every set seems to be a backdrop to an imminent catastrophe. Scene follows scene, and climax follows climax. The main character, Richard Hannay, becomes unintentionally involved in a murder, and a plot to steal British military secrets by a ring of foreign spies. Hitchcock’s camera seems to chase Hannay as he rushes from London to Scotland and back again, then down to the Channel coast, in an attempt to clear his name and thwart the spies. Hitchcock included a number of scenes set in the lower-class London streets he had known as a boy. He remarked that English filmmakers often ‘ignore the people who jump onto moving buses … queues outside cinemas, music hall girls, traffic cops … [but] it’s in them that the spirit of England lies’.

A ticket to see The 39 Steps cost only sixpence. By the end of the Thirties around 15 million sixpenny cinema tickets were sold in England every week, and there were one hundred cinemas in Liverpool alone. Almost half of the entire adult population of major cities and their suburbs went to see a film weekly; a quarter of the population went twice a week, especially in the colder months. In the Thirties ‘super-cinemas’ were built that seated up to 4,000 people and had appropriately grand names, such as ‘The Ritz’, ‘The Majestic’ and ‘The Rialto’. On entering the cinema, the public passed through red-carpeted foyers and up wide staircases to their seats. Baroque or rococo-style cinemas, replete with cherubs, were not uncommon; others favoured designs with Egyptian, Greek, Indian or Roman themes. These were suitably exotic settings in which to see romantic films set in distant times and places and featuring glamorous stars. Before the film commenced a musician would play popular tunes on a Mighty Wurlitzer organ that rose slowly from beneath the floor to the level of the stage. During the film, audiences were invariably absorbed, and often opinionated; workingclass spectators in particular offered audible criticisms of the spectacle.

There is no doubt that films were responsible for profound cultural and social change. They were among the first forms of entertainment lower-class men and women could enjoy together, the pub remaining a predominantly male preserve. The cinema also offered young people a place to meet unaccompanied by their parents, and under cover of darkness: ‘To the Odeon we have come,’ ran the hymn of the Odeon Club for teenagers, ‘Now we can have some fun.’ The fun might include smoking, drinking and ‘necking and petting’.

The phrase ‘necking and petting’ testifies to another great cultural change wrought by the cinema – the introduction of American slang to the English streets. Nouns such as ‘bunk’, ‘dope’ and ‘baloney’ could now be heard in inner-city Manchester, while young boys in Durham threatened to ‘bump off’ each other, or at the very least give each other ‘the works’. Most youths now used the adjective ‘OK’ where they had previously said ‘all right’; many now said ‘yeah’ or ‘yep’ instead of ‘yes’, and ‘nope’ for ‘no’. To workingclass English ears, slang from across the Atlantic seemed democratic and liberating, since their own idiom signalled their lowly place within England’s rigidly hierarchical class system.

The cinema weakened the hold earlier forms of entertainment had on the population. Punch and Judy shows and barrel organs now lost their charm for children, as music halls did for adults, while provincial repertory theatres struggled to stay open. Other traditional leisure activities, however, retained their popularity. People danced just as much in the Thirties as they had during the ‘jazz age’ of the Twenties. City dance halls attracted suited and frocked customers on a Saturday night, while countless people ‘dropped in’ for a dance on their way home from work during the week. The working classes often preferred to hire venues such as mission or municipal halls, where they would only have to charge two shillings for a ticket. One eyewitness described men entering a dance hall together and lining ‘up on one side, the women on the other. A male made his choice, crossed over, took a girl with the minimum of ceremony and slid into rhythm.’ By the early Thirties, jazz had already given way to big band music, and that in turn would soon be supplanted by swing. New dances swept the entire nation for brief spells, among them the patriotic ‘Lambeth Walk’, the conga and the hokey-cokey. In the north of the England, ‘pattern’ or ‘formation’ dancing, which we know as ‘ballroom’, became the fashion.

Sport extended the wide appeal it had commanded since the late nineteenth century, despite the fact that women were still generally excluded. Few sports facilities were available for girls at state schools, and there was limited encouragement for women to attend workingclass sporting events as spectators. The Twenties had been the first decade of mass sporting crowds, with the construction of Wembley Stadium, the rebuilding of Twickenham and the expansion of Wimbledon. During the Thirties, the crowds of men swelled even further.

Yet, predictably, the particular sport depended on one’s class. The question ‘Anyone for tennis?’ was never directed at the working classes, and the cricket authorities also strove to preserve the sport’s aura of elitism. On scorecards the initials of ‘gentleman amateurs’ were printed, while only surnames were given for professional ‘players’ such as Jack Hobbs, despite the fact that he was the greatest cricketer of the age. Players had to address gentlemen either as ‘Mister’ or by their titles, while ‘amateurs’ referred to everyone by their first names. The captains of country and county teams were always amateurs – the idea of a ‘professional’ captaining England was unthinkable. While some spectators complained that an aristocratic pedigree did not guarantee runs and wickets, nothing was done to reduce the snobbery.

The most popular workingclass sports were rugby league in the north of England and football everywhere else. Both sports were exclusively male – the Football Association had banned women’s football in the Twenties. The passion for football among workingclass boys and men was universal. There were 35,000 junior football clubs in England by the end of the Thirties, while many businesses also organized teams. The great professional team of the decade was Arsenal, who won five league titles and two FA Cups. During the interwar period, sporting occasions such as the FA Cup and the Grand National were designated ‘national events’. They were reported by the BBC and often attended by members of the royal family, who presented the trophy. It was a fairy tale in which England’s aristocracy complimented its meritocracy.

Countless ‘punters’ bet on football matches. The most popular form of betting was the ‘pools’, where people predicted results and cash prizes were drawn from the entry money. ‘The extent to which the lives of so many in Liverpool centre round the pools,’ one sociologist commented, ‘must be seen to be believed.’ Many people also bet on horse racing, and you could also have a ‘punt’ on boxing, rugby league, or pigeon and greyhound racing. It is no coincidence that these sports were almost exclusively workingclass, since gambling was believed to have replaced drink as the vice of the workers. Their preference for speculation over saving was interpreted as a sign of profligacy, but it more obviously suggested a lack of faith in the future.

Other popular leisure activities of the period included hiking and cycling. The predominantly middle-class hikers looked and acted like grown-up Boy Scouts and Girl Guides, with their distinctive green shorts, long socks, rucksacks, and preparedness for any eventuality. On his solitary country rambles, the author J. B. Priestley would encounter ‘twenty or thirty people together and all dressed for their respective parts. They almost looked German, organized, semi-military, semi-athletic.’ The same writer also regularly came across cyclists, and wondered ‘exactly what pleasure they were getting from the surrounding country, as they never seemed to lift their heads from their handlebars’. According to the sociologist Richard Hoggart, ‘A sign of arrival at real adolescence’ for workingclass youths was ‘the agreement from one’s parents to the buying of a bike on the hire-purchase system. Then one goes out on it at weekends, with one of those mixed clubs which sweep every Sunday through town and out past the quiet train terminus.’

Hikers and cyclists were emblems of the decade’s contradictory relationship with the natural world. Suburbanites, whose new houses had encroached on the countryside, were eager to visit the country proper and experience the beauties and benefits of nature. But they reached it by means of transport which was harmful to its inhabitants and its landscape. An endless procession of cars, motorbikes and buses left London at the beginning of the weekend, filling the country air with petrol fumes. Having arrived at their rural destination, the suburban invaders proceeded to behave like town dwellers, in effect bringing suburbia with them. Into the early hours the tourists would sing and dance in the meadows and quiet villages.

The mania for hiking and cycling was part of a yearning for fitness and fresh air that was not unrelated to concerns about the nation’s health and military preparedness. The Health and Strength League, which boasted over 100,000 members, promoted fitness among England’s youth, in order to make it ready for another war. They successfully lobbied the parsimonious Tory-dominated government for £2 million in grants to local authorities for the construction of sports centres, playing fields, swimming pools, youth hostels and lidos.

The most characteristic leisure activity of the decade was probably the holiday. Over the course of the Thirties, the number of people entitled to paid holidays increased from 1 million to 11 million (around half of the entire working population) – the Holidays with Pay Act (1938) granted a week’s paid holiday per year to most factory, shop and office workers. This was a significant victory for the unions, who had campaigned for paid holidays for over twenty years, and a great boon for the workers. The most popular holiday destinations were seaside resorts, with 70 per cent of the population of some northern industrial cities visiting the coast over the summer. Londoners also loved to visit the seaside, with Southend among the favoured destinations. Those with more time, and money, could travel down to the English Riviera in the southwest.

At the beach, children would build sandcastles or go on donkey rides, while adults would sunbathe, read or play football. Anyone who wished could swim in the sea, and sailing boats could usually be hired. Along the promenade there were pubs, cafes and restaurants. Funfairs, zoos, concert and music halls vied for custom, as did large venues for ballroom dancing. In this carnival atmosphere, people tended to drink more and wear less. One visitor to Margate described the fun: ‘Singing, flirting, drinking, banjos and laughter; a distinct touch of sunburn; our lungs full of sea air, ourselves full of lobster and salmon.’

The passion for the seaside among the working classes prompted Billy Butlin to set up the first ever commercial holiday camp at Skegness in 1936. It proved so successful that he was encouraged to open other camps. By the end of the decade, there were more than one hundred commercial camps in England, which attracted over half a million holidaymakers each year. The camps offered three meals a day and entertainment for only 35 shillings per week in the low season. Entertainment typically included around-the-clock live music, dancing, sports, day trips, talent shows and beauty contests, including the selection of the ‘glamorous grandmother’. After a day of frenetic fun, the presenter on the camp’s Radio Butlin would say ‘Good night, campers’ at 11.45 p.m. Many holidaymakers ignored the announcement, however, and danced on long past midnight. At Butlin’s, and at the seaside generally, the working classes were determined to prove their fun was as good as that of their so-called ‘betters’.

24

The country of the dole

J. B. Priestley was one of millions of people who visited Blackpool in the Thirties, passing through the seaside resort in 1933 while compiling his survey of the nation, English Journey. Priestley liked the democratic atmosphere of the Lancashire resort: ‘you are all as good as one another so long as you have the necessary sixpence’, the town seemed to say to workingclass holidaymakers. People had formerly lived in ‘a network of relations up and down the social scale, despising or pitying their inferiors, admiring or hating their superiors’; but in the ‘American’ atmosphere of Blackpool, snobbery seemed to be losing its grip on the English psyche.

Yet some aspects of Blackpool manifested less welcome features of ‘Americanization’. According to Priestley, the entertainment on offer at the resort was ‘standardised’, ‘mechanised’, ‘calculating’ and ‘cheap’. In all these respects, the town was emblematic of the emerging England of mass production and mass consumption: the whole country, Priestley commented, was ‘rapidly Blackpooling itself’. ‘Everything and everybody’, Priestley concluded, ‘is being rushed down … one dusty arterial road of cheap mass production and standardised living.’

Priestley was depressed by the ‘monotony’ of this new mechanized country, but nevertheless thought it infinitely preferable to another England he encountered: the old ‘industrial England of coal, iron, steel, cotton, wool, railways … square-faced chapels, back-to-back houses … slag heaps … doss houses … sooty dismal little towns [and] grim fortress-like cities’. England’s urban centres had remained stationary in the nineteenth century, as if they were part of an industrial museum. Looking at the predominantly unemployed inhabitants of such places, Priestley thought there must still be a war on; this seemed doubly wretched to him since many of the unemployed he encountered had fought in France two decades previously.

This ‘country of the dole’ enjoyed none of the benefits of the decade’s economic boom. Those who lived in the north of England, and much of the Midlands, did not regard the period as an age of plenty, but as ‘the hungry thirties’ or ‘the devil’s decade’. After the brief post-war boom, Britain’s staple export industries were in terminal decline and reliant on shrinking international demand. By the late Twenties a quarter of British coal miners and steel and iron workers were unemployed, along with half of those who worked in cotton and a third of shipbuilders. The mining towns of Durham, the cotton towns of Lancashire and the metal and shipbuilding centres of Cumberland and the Tyne and Tees were officially designated ‘depressed areas’.

And then came the crash. After 1929, international demand collapsed, cotton exports and steel production were reduced by half, coal production fell by a fifth and shipbuilding by 85 per cent. The consequences for workers were predictable and devastating. By 1932 over 40 per cent of miners, 50 per cent of iron and steel workers, and 60 per cent of shipbuilders were out of work. In many towns the unemployment rate was over 50 per cent and in some it rose to 80 per cent after the younger inhabitants left in search of work. Not only were more people out of work in these ghost towns, but they were unemployed for much longer – for years or even decades. Industrial action was no longer an option after the failure of the General Strike, while parliament offered little scope for protest, since Labour MPs now comprised a mere 8 per cent of the Commons. Yet many English people felt it was the government’s duty to help the unemployed. Did the National Government have the vision to protect citizens who had lost jobs through no fault of their own?

The chancellor, Neville Chamberlain, insisted that mass unemployment was an inevitable consequence of market forces. All the government could do was wait until economic conditions improved, even if that was unlikely to happen for ‘at least a decade’. The contrast with his attitude to the 1931 financial crisis was marked. The cabinet now believed that the currency and the banks could be saved by ‘balancing the budget’, which in practice meant making deep cuts to unemployment benefit. While the miners, metalworkers and shipbuilders could be left to face a maelstrom of market forces unaided, the banks could not. The government practised free market capitalism for manufacturing and manual workers, and socialism for the financial and monetary sector. Critics on the left reminded the coalition that England was one of the wealthiest countries in the world, and the centre of the largest empire in history.

By doing nothing for the unemployed, the National Government exacerbated the impoverishment of a large part of the population. They tried to reduce the existing unemployment benefit in the name of ‘economy’; when the long-term unemployed exhausted the ‘insurance pay’ that was drawn from their own contributions or passed the six-month period of entitlement, the benefit they received was, in the words of one sociologist, ‘limited to the smallest sum that will keep [them] from dying or becoming unduly troublesome’. This meagre relief was granted to the unemployed only after a ‘means test’ had been carried out to ascertain whether the applicant was truly ‘destitute’ and ‘deserving’. If the unemployed man had alternative sources of income – either through savings, or because another member of their household was in work – then the benefit he received would be reduced or withdrawn.

The means test was popular among middle-class suburbanites. Money from the public coffers ought not to be ‘wasted’ on those who did not need it; besides, ‘lavish’ benefits would deter the unemployed from making an ‘effort’ to find work. It was believed to be perfectly reasonable that an unemployed man who refused to take up a job offer 250 miles from where he and his family had always lived should have his allowance cut off. The unemployed naturally took a different view – why should a man who was not responsible for the loss of his job be penalized for having saved? Why should his family face a choice between starvation and leaving their community to resettle hundreds of miles away?

The unemployed loathed the way in which the means test was carried out. Officials from the local Public Assistance Committee (PAC) would drop into their homes unannounced to see if their children were working or if they had recently purchased clothes or furniture. If either was found to be the case, the benefit payments to the family were cut or stopped. Alternatively, the PAC men would insist that certain household items and clothes be pawned before benefit could be claimed. One woman tried to prove her poverty to a committee official by showing him the drawer in which her baby daughter slept. Unimpressed, the representative ‘asked if the baby was being breast fed, and [when] I said yes he reduced the allowance for a child’ on the grounds that it would not require other nourishment. The means test was psychologically as well as economically damaging. Workers who had been independent for their entire lives were forced to open their doors to the successors of the hated Poor Law Guardians before being humiliated by probing questions. There was an irony in the way an increasingly bureaucratic social service state functioned: it had the power to intrude into every aspect of people’s private lives, yet it would offer them neither support nor security.

Between 1932 and 1933 over 180,000 benefit claimants had their relief cancelled, while it was reduced for half of those who continued to receive it, ‘saving’ the government £24 million. Chamberlain was forced to admit that the system required ‘rationalisation’, yet his attempt to improve its ‘efficiency’, via the Unemployment Act of 1934, did little to ease the plight of those without work. Nor did the provision of grants to certain ‘special’ areas of the country make much difference.

Unemployment became the focus of extensive sociological research. ‘From the London School of Economics and other places,’ commented the journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, ‘went annually many earnest persons, male and female, to plant their tents in depressed areas.’ Here was a manifestation of the political conscience of the age and also of its ‘scientific’ spirit. In 1936, the Mass Observation organization was founded to collect data concerning the British people; its monthly magazine offered statistics on economic and social trends to a public that was eager for facts.

As a result of these investigations, we know a great deal about life in the ‘hungry thirties’. According to Seebohm Rowntree’s ‘human needs’ standard, 30 per cent of proletarian families lived below the poverty line in northern cities such as Liverpool and York, at a time when the working classes comprised over 70 per cent of the population in such urban areas. To give readers an idea of what existence on the poverty line was like, Rowntree described everyday life for a family in which the wage earner was ‘never absent from his work for a single day’. Such a family ‘must never spend a penny on railway fares … never purchase a newspaper … never save … never join trade unions … must smoke no tobacco … drink no beer … have no money for marbles or sweets … nothing must be bought but that which is absolutely necessary for the maintenance of physical health.’ This meant a weekday dinner of boiled potatoes and white bread with ‘a lick of marge’, accompanied by ‘a pinch of tay’ with ‘a screw of sugar’ in it.

Those who lived below the poverty line lacked the income for the basic requirements of rent and the minimum diet. Parents in such households ‘literally starved themselves in order to feed and clothe their children’. A Liverpool family whose male head was unemployed ‘had nothing but bread, margarine and tea, with condensed milk, for breakfast and dinner’ and went ‘to bed early so as not to feel hungry’. They lived four or five people to a filthy room, in the squalid Victorian slums that remained standing after the National Government discontinued Labour’s clearance programme. There were an estimated 70,000 such dwellings in Manchester and 60,000 in Sheffield. No other European country had such extensive or insalubrious slums. Dampness, leaking roofs, peeling plaster and infestation of bugs were commonplace in these back-to-back terraces. None of the houses had hot water and many lacked clean cold water; several people would sleep in each single bed.

Living in these conditions took its inevitable toll on slum dwellers’ health. They were malnourished, with nearly 70 per cent of all workingclass children in the period having rickets; many were also afflicted with tuberculosis and anaemia. Often it was the mothers who suffered most. ‘Mam’ sacrificed her portion of the meagre household diet for her children, yet she became weak in consequence. A third of all women living below the poverty line were classified as suffering from ill health, while maternal mortality was identified as one of the most serious consequences of unemployment. Yet such findings were dismissed by the National Government, which attributed ill health to irresponsible household management. When doctors who worked in impoverished areas publicly challenged this view, their livelihoods were threatened by the government.

Along with sociologists, numerous novelists and journalists flocked to the underworld. ‘Dole literature’ of both the documentary and fictional variety became a popular subgenre in the Thirties. Affluent southerners enjoyed reading detailed accounts of the plight of those who lived ‘up north’. ‘Misery,’ as one novelist commented, is a ‘marketable commodity’, as was naturalism. The ‘Condition of England question’, which had been asked in the 1840s by authors such as Dickens, was now asked again with even more fervour. Autobiographies by manual labourers who had lost their livelihoods became popular, as did the volumes of essayists such as Orwell, who followed in Priestley’s footsteps and recorded his impressions in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). Popular dole novels of the period included Walter Brierley’s Means-Test Man and Walter Greenwood’s Love on the Dole, in which an archetypal image of the genre appears. ‘Motionless as a statue’, an unemployed man hangs around a street corner, ‘gaze fixed on pavement, hands in pockets, shoulders hunched, the bitter wind blowing.’

Many of these books vividly evoke the psychological impact of unemployment. Orwell was horrified to find that many men in the north of England were ashamed of being unemployed. ‘The middle classes were talking about “lazy idle loafers on the dole”, and naturally these opinions percolated to the working class themselves.’ Their feeling of personal degradation was accompanied by a sense of impotence, and by depression, cynicism, mental instability, defeatism and fatalism. It was through work that the older working classes had defined themselves and their place in the world; without it, they felt hopeless. Youths, on the other hand, were less affected: Priestley described them as ‘undisciplined and carefree, the dingy butterflies of the back streets’.

The unemployed of all ages had a tendency to turn violent. Sometimes their violence was directed against officials at the labour exchange, and on other occasions it was directed against themselves. Home Office statistics show that two unemployed men committed suicide every day in England in the early Thirties. Yet the violence was generally sporadic, being smothered by an overwhelming sense of apathy and boredom. It was this, along with sheer exhaustion, that stifled the anger of the unemployed towards a system that had failed them. While some Tory MPs feared that a revolutionary situation had developed, the jobless displayed little appetite for revolution. ‘It cannot be reiterated too often,’ one sociologist commented, ‘that unemployment is not an active state … The overwhelming majority have no political convictions.’ Orwell was shocked by the lack of politically conscious misery he encountered in Wigan. He attributed it to the longevity of people’s suffering – after years without work, many had simply settled down to the dole as a way of life. He also reckoned that cheap luxuries, such as ‘fish and chips … chocolate … the radio, the movies’ had ‘between them averted a revolution’.

The unemployed may not have been revolutionary, but they did not suffer in silence. Thousands of unemployed people, organized by the communist-led National Unemployed Workers’ Movement (NUWM), participated in protests against the means test and the benefit cuts. The press portrayed the demonstrators as violent Bolshevik troublemakers who used bricks and stones in skirmishes with police. The police’s official policy was to ‘disperse’ any protesters who were ‘disorderly or about to become disorderly’ with baton charges on horseback. Some policemen even turned rifles on the protesters; many were wounded, and a few were killed. The police were granted greater powers by the National Government in 1934, when a Sedition Bill enabled them to stop and search anyone ‘suspected’ of ‘sedition’. Countless arrests followed the protests, but the NUWM was undeterred. It organized a number of ‘hunger marches’ from northern cities to London’s Hyde Park, the protesters sleeping in workhouses and hostels on the way. These marches attracted coverage in the press and were frequently mentioned in parliament by Labour MPs.

Yet Labour’s official attitude to the protests and hunger marches was ambivalent. Under the new leadership of Clement Attlee, the party refused to organize demonstrations with the communist NUWM, and condemned the violence that erupted during some of the protests. It was a classic Labour compromise: the party members expressed solidarity with a popular left-wing movement, while distancing themselves from its revolutionary programme. The communists accused Labour of lacking the boldness to make the most of the revolutionary moment, but the truth was that the Labour leadership wanted to postpone that moment indefinitely. Although Attlee and other leading Labour figures attempted to distance themselves from the conservatism of the MacDonald era with radical economic proposals, they were as committed as their former leader to gradualist socialism, achieved through parliamentary reform.

The march that inspired most sympathy among Labour MPs was the ‘Jarrow Crusade’ of 1936. During the late nineteenth century, Jarrow’s shipyard had flourished and its population had increased tenfold between 1850 and 1920. By 1932, however, there was no work for 80 per cent of its adult population, many of whom suffered from ill health, with deaths from tuberculosis higher than in the nineteenth century. The following year, the Labour candidate for Jarrow, ‘Red’ Ellen Wilkinson, implored MacDonald to help the town. The erstwhile Labour leader and current coalition prime minister promised he would keep Jarrow in mind, yet MacDonald was now politically irrelevant; Walter Runciman, president of the Board of Trade, told the inhabitants of Jarrow to ‘work out their own salvation’.

In early 1936, Wilkinson, by now the town’s MP, set about organizing the Jarrow Crusade. Funded by a popular appeal, the hunger march was intended to protest against Runciman’s disregard and to publicize the plight of a ‘town that was murdered’. The organizers had no affiliation with the NUWM or with communism; it was a Labour initiative. In the autumn, 200 unemployed male inhabitants of the town marched over 250 miles to London, taking just over a month to complete the journey. When they eventually arrived in the capital, the marchers declined to join a Communist party rally and instead organized a meeting attended by as many as 15,000 sympathizers at which speeches were given, songs sung and banners waved. The marchers wanted to carry a petition to the government asking for assistance, but coalition representatives refused to receive their deputation. In parliament Labour MPs condemned this decision, describing the government’s ‘complacency’ as ‘an affront to the national conscience’; Runciman, however, defended the coalition’s record and pointed out that unemployment in Jarrow had improved in recent months. No central government assistance would be offered to the town. As for Jarrow’s local government, its Unemployment Assistance Board stopped the marchers’ benefits while they were away, on the grounds that the men would not have been able to work had employment become available.

Many of the marchers believed their efforts had been a waste of time, yet other protesters took a more positive view. They argued that their demonstrations had ‘highlighted the situation that people were in’ and had ‘shown the authorities we are not prepared to take things lying down’. Besides, even though the campaign may not have produced immediate results, the memory of the protests remained with those who had grown up in ‘the devil’s decade’ and who would come of voting age in the Forties. That ‘depression generation’ would use its vote to demand the nationalization of Britain’s ailing industries and the creation of a welfare state in which hunger marches would no longer be necessary.

25

The Fasci

The course of Britain’s continental foreign policy had been set by Lloyd George at the peace conference in 1919. Its central aim was the reintegration of a peaceful Germany into the international community. A contented and economically flourishing Germany was, Britain believed, necessary for European stability; it was also vital to the balance of continental power, especially now that the ‘threat’ of communism had emerged in Russia. British and French suspicion of Soviet Russia deprived them of their former ally on Germany’s eastern border. No one in Britain believed a successful war could be fought against Germany without Russian aid; therefore Germany had to be mollified.

Britain remained at a remove from European affairs throughout the Twenties. Some observers detected the revival of an age-old isolationist instinct, typical of an island people. We do not have to look very far back in history for the main cause of English aloofness: a terror of becoming embroiled in another European conflict, after the horrors of the Great War. Another factor was the country’s perception of itself as an imperial, rather than as a European, power. Pre-eminent politicians of the age, including Baldwin and Chamberlain, regarded continental affairs as a sideshow to the empire and the ailing domestic economy. The main object of foreign policy was not central Europe but the Mediterranean and the East, where Japan was perceived as a growing menace. In the Twenties, government officials even regarded American ambitions as a bigger concern than the prospect of a resurgent Germany. These worries were partially allayed when a naval treaty was signed in 1922 between Britain, the United States and Japan, but they did not disappear entirely.

In any case, Britain believed it was unnecessary to intervene extensively in continental affairs, since the prospect of European war was remote. In the view of British politicians, previous European conflicts had been caused by the aggression of an overambitious continental power, such as Napoleon’s France or Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany. In the Twenties, no power was capable of conducting a war beyond its frontiers. Following the Versailles Treaty, Germany had no army and no armaments, and Russia had been economically and militarily enfeebled by revolution; France, meanwhile, had neither the desire nor the military capacity to embark on a campaign of conquest. Successive British governments of the Twenties confidently told their military commanders that no major European war was likely for ‘at least ten years’.

From 1918 to 1931, every British government pursued the country’s key goals – reintegrating Germany within the international order, while promoting the League of Nations and disarmament. In 1923 France had been in dangerous confrontation with Germany when the latter had defaulted on reparation payments. In response French troops had occupied the Ruhr area of Germany. MacDonald, who assumed the role of foreign secretary as well as prime minister in the Labour government of 1923, helped to resolve the situation by facilitating the first negotiated post-war agreement, the Dawes Plan. The accord ended the French occupation and attempted to set reparation payments at a level that was both fair and feasible for Germany, which was then in the middle of an unprecedented economic crisis. MacDonald energetically promoted the League of Nations, and attempted to draw the ‘selfish and unscrupulous’ French further into its orbit, in order to moderate their hostility towards Germany.

In contrast to MacDonald, Baldwin was, in the words of his private secretary, ‘reluctant to study Europe’. Nevertheless, his foreign secretary, Austen Chamberlain, built on MacDonald’s work and helped engineer the Locarno Treaty of 1925. Through these accords Germany and France guaranteed each other’s frontiers and agreed to settle any future disputes by arbitration, with Britain and Italy promising to assist any party whose territory was threatened. On the armament question, while Labour and Tory governments both advocated arms reductions, their motives differed. MacDonald, a staunch internationalist and former pacifist, favoured disarmament for idealistic reasons; the Conservatives regarded it as an excellent way to save the Treasury money. Throughout the Twenties, defence expenditure was lowered by successive chancellors, including Churchill, until by 1933 it accounted for only 2.5 per cent of gross domestic product. The nascent Royal Air Force received limited funding, and the number of its squadrons was reduced from 187 in 1919 to 18 in 1923, while the army lacked the necessary equipment to fight a large-scale war. Plans were drawn up for a new British naval base in Singapore to counter a potential Japanese threat, but the idea came to nothing. Although a reduction in defence spending was usual in peacetime, some people saw it as a symptom of Britain’s economic decline, while others were concerned about the country’s capacity to protect its empire.

In the years following Locarno all was quiet on the European front, to the delight of British politicians eager to direct their attention elsewhere. Germany consistently paid its reparations, which were gradually scaled down; it also attended meetings of the League of Nations. Germany’s Foreign Minister, Gustav Stresemann, was determined to place ‘a peaceful Germany at the centre of a peaceful Europe’; this aim seemed realistic, since the country had recovered after the slump of the early Twenties. The improvement in German living standards, after the appalling poverty of the hyperinflationary years following the war, encouraged political stability in its democratic Weimar Republic.

In 1928 Germany signed the Kellogg–Briand Pact, along with Britain, France, the United States, Japan, Italy and several other countries. The signatories repudiated war as a means of resolving disputes; a multilateral armament reduction agreement, or even a multilateral disarmament treaty, at last seemed a possibility. The disarmament cause found a passionate and articulate advocate in MacDonald in the late Twenties and early Thirties.

During these years, many English intellectuals were in favour of disarmament. Historians espoused the view that the arms race, rather than German aggression, had been the main cause of the Great War. It was therefore imperative that all nations reduced their armaments and allowed the League to arbitrate international disputes. A variety of vivid war memoirs were also published at the end of the Twenties, reminding readers of the horrors of conflict. Partly as a result of these publications, pacifism gained great currency among the general population; the Oxford Union passed the motion that ‘in the next war this House would not fight for King and Country’, not that many English people believed war was imminent. In its commentary on 1929, The Times wrote, ‘Except for sundry disturbances confined to imperial localities … the year passed everywhere in tranquillity.’

And yet closer observation of the continental scene would have revealed a disquieting development. Most of the independent democratic states created at Versailles from the ruins of the defeated Austro-Hungarian empire, such as Hungary, Poland and Bulgaria, had abandoned democratic government and turned to authoritarian rule. Nor had the ethnic minorities within these new countries been successfully integrated; much of the large German population living inside Czechoslovakia, for instance, regarded Germany as its true home. Meanwhile, Portugal and Spain also jettisoned democracy for military government. The shift towards authoritarian rule across Europe was seen as potentially detrimental to peace, since the new rulers criticized the League and espoused aggressive nationalism. The movement to which they belonged was as yet nameless and shapeless. Soon it would have a title of its own.

The miasma then spread to Italy. The country had arrived at Versailles determined to carry off some of the prizes of victory. During the war, the British and the French had promised the Italians extensive territorial gains in return for military support, including most of the Dalmatian coast and a number of colonies. Yet Italy’s claims were rejected, with the British and French reneging on their ‘gentleman’s agreement’. In consequence the Italian representatives angrily withdrew from the conference, and the peace settlement was reviled in Italy. It was in this context that ultranationalistic and paramilitary organizations, or ‘Fasci’, emerged throughout Italy in the early Twenties. These disparate and violent groups were also summoned into existence by the rise of Italian communism during Italy’s severe post-war economic depression. The communists organized massive strikes and demonstrations, inspiring fear among the industrialists and the property-owning classes, who no longer believed that the liberal political elite of Italy’s nascent democracy was capable of dealing with them.

One of these ‘Fasci’ was led by the war veteran and former socialist newspaper editor Benito Mussolini. With rousing rhetoric and considerable charisma, Mussolini held out the vague promise of a ‘national rebirth’. He would impose ‘authority’ and ‘order’ on a society that appeared to be descending into chaos, and take control of the failing economy with the help of the industrialists. He would also redress the terms of the ‘mutilated war victory’ by extending Italy’s territories. His vision, at once atavistic and modern, appealed to many among the middle and landowning classes who saw no fundamental incompatibility between ‘Fascism’ and their staunch Catholicism. The movement flourished in the country at a local level, and by the autumn of 1922 possessed 300,000 members. Encouraged by the groundswell of support, Mussolini decided to try to seize power by marching on Rome with his paramilitary ‘blackshirts’. The march instilled fear in an anxious establishment and the Italian king invited Mussolini to become prime minister. Despairing of Liberal politicians and democracy, the elite had simply surrendered.

The new prime minister made short work of his political opposition, altering the electoral law to his party’s advantage and arranging the assassination of his rival, the socialist leader Giacomo Matteotti. He then proceeded to suppress all other political parties and non-Fascist newspapers, and locked up political dissenters. By these means, and with the connivance of the Italian elite, Mussolini established a totalitarian Fascist state that assumed control of the economy and the judiciary, while encouraging militarism and discipline in the population through the creation of youth organizations. It also restricted personal freedom, with the threat of arrest to any intellectual who opposed Mussolini in word or deed. Finally, the government created a cult around Mussolini, as Italy’s godlike leader, or ‘duce’.

MacDonald soon established cordial relations with the murderer of Matteotti. Churchill praised the ‘gentle’ Duce in the press, as the saviour of ‘civilised society’ in Italy and ‘the necessary antidote to the Russian poison’. The fear of communism invariably overcame concerns about the threat Fascism posed to democracy. Few British politicians were worried about Mussolini’s expansionist ambitions, none of which were likely to upset the balance of power in Europe.

In other words, an ultranationalist, outwardly aggressive totalitarian state was tolerable in Italy because it was not Germany. Not only was Germany a powerful economic force, but the country was situated at the heart of the continent. Any attempt to extend its borders westwards would provoke another war, and, while eastern expansion was much less of a concern now that Russia was no longer a British ally, an enlarged Germany might still be a threat to continental peace and to British interests.

Another ultranationalist right-wing party had emerged in Bavaria during Germany’s economic depression in the early Twenties. The National Socialist German Workers’ Party offered an antidote to burgeoning German communism. According to the party leaders, Germany had been denied her ‘rightful’ position as the greatest European power by the ‘Marxist’ politicians who had ‘stabbed’ the country ‘in the back’ by surrendering in 1918, and by the ‘vindictive’ Allies at Versailles. The National Socialists were led by Adolf Hitler, a war veteran who earned a reputation as ‘Germany’s Mussolini’ for his mesmerizing rhetoric and eagerness to use paramilitary violence against his opponents. Yet while Hitler’s party attracted strong support among the Bavarian middle class and the landholding peasantry, it failed to secure the blessing of the Bavarian army. When it attempted a coup in 1923, it was easily quashed and its leaders were imprisoned. In jail Hitler composed his rambling semi-literate autobiography, Mein Kampf, in which he vilified the Jewish race as a ‘poison’ that had adulterated the ‘pure’ Germanic race. He also identified ‘Russia and her vassal border states’ as the territory into which Germany must expand in order to gain essential ‘living space’. After his release from prison, Hitler renamed his party the ‘Nazis’, but they made little electoral headway, claiming only twelve seats and a mere 2.6 per cent of the vote in 1928.

When the financial crash came in 1929, everything changed. In severe economic depression, the appeal of the Nazis increased exponentially. It was stimulated by the widespread support for the Communist party, which organized strikes and protests throughout the country. The German economy appeared to be on the point of collapsing – production fell by 40 per cent, while unemployment rose to 30 per cent. Hitler blamed the crisis on the usual suspects – the Jews who ‘controlled world finance’ and the politicians who had drafted the ‘punitive’ Versailles Treaty. At the 1930 election the Nazis and the communists gained around a third of the popular vote between them; two years later they claimed over half, with the Nazis emerging as the largest single party.

It was difficult to see how the country could be governed without the consent of either the Nazis or the communists, and it was clear which party Germany’s leaders would favour. President Hindenburg appointed Hitler as chancellor of the German Reich, in the belief that his presidential power could control the inexperienced and ‘vulgar’ Bavarian demagogue. The industrialists and the wealthier classes saw Hitler as a puppet, and preferred any alternative to communism. Yet once in power, Hitler proved to be as ruthless as Mussolini, arresting and killing political opponents, abolishing the unions and the free press, and establishing a one-party totalitarian state. His corporatist approach to economics echoed the Duce’s, as did his emphasis on internal ‘order’ and ‘discipline’. His obsession with German racial purity and persecution of Jews went beyond Italian Fascist anti-Semitism. Hitler was also more emphatic than Mussolini in his criticisms of the Versailles Treaty, demanding that its clauses should be revoked immediately and that Germany should be permitted to rearm.

Hitler’s rise to power did not arouse great concern within the Tory party or England’s right-wing press. Most Conservatives saw the Nazis as preferable to the communists, and many sympathized with Hitler’s grievances. Newspapers such as the Daily Mail praised the new German leader as the ‘saviour’ of his nation and even applauded his anti-Semitism. Hitler’s features soon became as familiar to the British public as those of a native politician. Churchill was virtually alone on the government benches, in the months after January 1933, in describing Nazism as a threat to the British Empire.

26

The bigger picture

The rise of Nazism caused the first significant division between the Tories and Labour over foreign policy since the war. In contrast to the Conservatives, Labour MPs vociferously opposed the Nazis from the outset, on ideological grounds. The party did not advocate rearmament as a means of preparing for a struggle with Fascism, but continued to promote multilateral disarmament. Labour had no faith in the failed diplomatic and military strategies of the pre-1914 era; instead they believed that the collective resolution of disputes through the League of Nations, coupled with disarmament, was the only way of confronting the Fascist dictators and guaranteeing a lasting peace.

Conservative MPs were equally enthusiastic about the League, though for more pragmatic reasons. They hoped the organization might maintain continental peace so that Britain could avoid an expensive and unpopular rearmament programme, and concentrate instead upon her pressing domestic and imperial concerns. The League inspired zeal among the population in the early Thirties. To a generation which believed that the senseless carnage of the recent war had been caused, in large part, by a lack of foresight and judgement among the major powers, the attraction of a supranational organization was obvious. It would, they believed, resolve all disputes, at minimal risk to its members.

The English saw the League as the answer to potential diplomatic problems, yet its existence begged many questions. How could the organization’s authority be backed up by force, in the absence of an army or of rearmament of its most powerful members? The League’s supporters appeared to believe that its moral authority made rearmament unnecessary: the mere threat of economic sanctions would, they thought, force an aggressor to back down. But while this may have sounded convincing in theory, it had yet to be proven in practice. Another potential flaw was the question of how the League could settle disputes impartially in cases where the interests of larger and smaller members clashed. In principle all members of the League were equal, but in reality states such as Luxembourg and Lithuania yielded far less influence with the organization than France, Italy, Japan or Britain. It augured ill that powerful nations such as Britain simply ignored the League whenever it was convenient for them to do so; they never, for example, referred disputes within the empire to the League for arbitration.

In 1931 Japan invaded Manchuria, officially a Chinese territory but in practice an autonomous province. In the months before the invasion, Manchuria had descended into a state of social and economic anarchy, and the Japanese took control in order to protect the numerous commercial interests they possessed there. Sympathetic to Japan’s point of view, the Tory-dominated National Government ensured the League did not condemn the country as an aggressor or invoke sanctions against her. Instead the British conducted an inquiry into the conquest and found that many Japanese grievances were justified, though they had acted unlawfully. It was a classic diplomatic fudge designed to reconcile China to the loss of territory and justify a reprimand to Japan on the international stage, yet it satisfied neither party. China felt let down by the League, while Japan withdrew from it in protest.

The Manchurian incident demonstrated the limitations of collective security. The League failed to arrive at a satisfactory settlement because Britain and France were unwilling to confront Japan, a powerful League member like themselves, with sanctions or the threat of force. At the same time, the episode reinforced fears among Conservatives concerning Britain’s commitment to collective security; might its membership of the League embroil the country in a disastrous war over an affair that was of little significance to its people or its imperial interests?

While the Manchurian invasion was still being investigated, the members of the League met in Geneva at the World Disarmament Conference. The meeting inspired optimism in England, partly because of the presence of representatives of the United States, now the world’s pre-eminent power. However, it soon became clear that several of the participants, including Japan and Italy, had no real appetite for disarmament, while Russia was also reluctant to reduce its military capacity, since it believed itself to be surrounded by hostile neighbours. In any case, the conference soon ran into the difficulties that had bedevilled continental diplomacy since Versailles: Germany wanted parity of armaments with the other great powers, but France would not allow this in the absence of military guarantees from Britain and the United States to defend her borders. Eventually Germany was offered armament parity following a four-year trial period, but the proposal arrived too late: once Hitler was installed as German chancellor at the start of 1933, the time for compromise was over. Eager to consolidate his power and popularity, he rejected the offer as a ‘personal and national insult’, before withdrawing from the conference and the League.

Hitler’s audacious move was greeted with approval in Germany, and dismay everywhere else. The gloom outside Germany intensified when he openly embarked on an extensive rearmament programme. The reaction of the National Government to these events was revealing. Without consulting the League or its old ally France, it decided to secure its own interests by striking a naval agreement with the Nazis, in contravention of the Versailles Treaty. The French, who regarded the Anglo–German naval pact as illegal and treacherous, drew the lesson that Britain would place its own concerns above those of collective security. Hitler, meanwhile, concluded that the Allies were divided, and that the League was weak; he could proceed to revise the Versailles Treaty with impunity.

The British chiefs of staff were disturbed by the League’s inability to deal with events in Manchuria and Germany and urged the National Government to rearm. An additional £40 million should be spent on the army, £90 million on the navy and £15 million on the air force. The civil service, overseen by Sir Warren Fisher, also recommended a review of Britain’s defences, and advised the National Government to bear in mind that Hitler was the author of the expansionist manifesto Mein Kampf. Churchill, who believed he was ‘preparing for war’, also begged the government to rearm, and to immediately form a ministry of defence.

Yet the National Government was reluctant to increase military spending – neither Baldwin nor Chamberlain regarded Hitler as a serious threat. The idea that he was a deranged ideologue who would stop at nothing to extend Germany’s borders was too absurd and appalling to contemplate. The government wanted to believe him when he declared that he merely wished to redress Germany’s complaints concerning the Versailles Treaty, and that he desired ‘good relations between England and Germany’. In Britain’s view, Germany’s grievances were legitimate, and nor would their remedy conflict with Britain’s essential interests – the security of its empire and its supremacy of the seas. And if revoking the Versailles Treaty involved the acquisition of some ‘living space’ for Germany in the east, then perhaps that would be acceptable, since Russian rather than British interests would be threatened. ‘If there is any fighting in Europe to be done,’ remarked Baldwin, ‘I should like to see the Nazis and the Bolsheviks doing it.’

Rearmament was, in any case, neither an economically nor electorally attractive policy. In 1932–3 Chamberlain reduced defence spending to its lowest level in eight years. An increase in expenditure on armaments would entail raising taxes or increasing the public debt, and Chamberlain had vowed not to do either. Meanwhile, the public clung to its belief in collective security and disarmament. The fact that Labour was gaining ground in local and by-elections on an overtly pacifistic platform encouraged the National Government to believe, as the civil service put it, that the ‘public is not yet sufficiently apprised of the reality of our dangers to swallow the financial consequences of the official recommendations’.

Inertia and exhaustion also played their part in the government’s feeble response to the Nazi threat. Baldwin and MacDonald were now beset with the afflictions of illness and age: increasingly deaf and suffering from lumbago, the Tory leader was, as Churchill spitefully put it, ‘amazingly lazy and sterile’, while MacDonald would be ‘far better off in a home’. Even in their prime, MacDonald and Baldwin would have been unable to deal with the mad gangster who now ruled Germany; by the mid-Thirties they lacked the requisite lucidity, energy and decisiveness even to attempt that demanding task. Yet it was above all the prospect of another horrific war that determined MacDonald and Baldwin’s cautious response. Both men were loath to rearm since they believed, as Baldwin put it, that ‘great armaments lead inevitably to war’, and both were convinced that a second world conflict would destroy Western civilization.

Even so, the government eventually acknowledged that the international situation had grown more ominous. Baldwin, who took over as prime minister from MacDonald in 1935, signalled a shift in the administration’s attitude. He committed to maintaining Britain’s naval strength and achieving parity with Germany’s burgeoning air force, yet the civil service was not satisfied by these assurances. It took the unprecedented step of publishing a White Paper, in which it warned the government that given Hitler’s decision to rearm, it could no longer rely on collective security to guarantee peace. Britain had to urgently address its military deficiencies. Baldwin finally admitted the truth of such arguments, and defended the White Paper in the Commons against criticisms from pro-disarmament Labour MPs. Meanwhile, Hitler used its publication as an excuse to reintroduce conscription in Germany, and to announce his plans to expand a German air force that he claimed had already achieved parity with the RAF.

The National Government responded by signing an agreement with France and Italy in April 1935. The ‘Stresa’ declaration committed the three countries to opposing ‘by all practicable means’ any ‘repudiation of treaties which may endanger the peace of Europe’. While the agreement reaffirmed each country’s commitment to the League, it also suggested that the National Government now accepted that collective security could no longer be maintained. In effect, the declaration represented a return to the diplomacy of pre-League and pre-war days, when alliances had aimed to create a balance of power. Britain and France had recruited Mussolini as an ally because they feared he might side with his fellow Fascist Hitler, and thus tip the balance in Germany’s favour.

Despite Baldwin’s conversion to the cause of rearmament and old-style diplomacy, his government still prevaricated when it came to implementing the recommendations of the White Paper. Rearmament was still unpopular among voters, and an election would have to be called soon. Since the beginning of the Thirties, countless pacifist movements had emerged in Britain, while organizations such as the League of Nations and the National Peace Council circulated millions of pamphlets and leaflets every year, promoting the cause of peace. Between 1934 and 1935 the League conducted a survey into British attitudes to collective security that became known as the ‘Peace Ballot’, because it revealed overwhelming support for multilateral disarmament.

In October 1935, Italy invaded Abyssinia, ostensibly to redress the Versailles Treaty, which had denied the Italians a share of the Allies’ colonial spoils. Britain saw Abyssinia as a legitimate sphere of Italian economic and colonial influence; it also wished to maintain cordial relations with its recently acquired Mediterranean ally. Yet Abyssinia was a member of the League, and now appealed for assistance; its fellow members condemned Italian aggression and demanded decisive collective action. Britain, however, refused to criticize Italy openly; instead the National Government tried to tempt Mussolini to call off his invasion with the promise of land in British Somalia.