The Great Silence: Britain from the Shadow of the First World War to the Dawn of the Jazz Age

by Juliet Nicolson

  With five sisters it would be extreme bad luck and quite against the odds if his mother was to have yet another girl. The longed for brother was expected to arrive at the end of March and on the 30th he went into the garden with Pam and together they gathered for their mother ‘some pheasants eyes, some enenemys, some cowslips and a few primroses’ which he sent up with his father to London where the new arrival was scheduled to appear.

  When the telegram containing the eagerly anticipated news arrived at the end of the following day, 31 March 1920, a dreadful gloom fell upon the household. Another girl. The housemaid Annie, very close to tears, immediately expressed her sympathies, voicing the thoughts of them all. ‘Oh WHAT a disappointment!’ she sniffed, while confirming to Nancy that she had heard from Mabel, the London parlourmaid, who had suspected the dreadful truth ‘after taking one look at his Lordship’s face’. Nancy was rather thrilled by the drama, telling everyone who would listen to her that the church bell had tolled as if for a funeral, the cattle in the surrounding fields had begun to moan at the news while inside the house the prospect of a nursery filled ‘with another furious occupant, shrieking like a cage of parrots’ had been greeted with horror.

  However, Tom knew how important it was to muster the sum of his not inconsiderable sense of tact when he sat down the following day to write to his mother, while not forgetting that she always stressed the importance of telling the truth. ‘My Darling Muv,’ he began, ‘I am so glad you have got a little girl’, continuing, ‘but of course it is a great pity that it was not a little boy but still.’ And hoping that would do it, he went on with a bit of home news that he thought might cheer her up. ‘Pam collected ten shillings this morning for the starving children and she is now keeping a shop or stall for them and she is going to have a box for collections.’

  Tom returned to school for the summer term on 4 April, just before Easter, promising not to make too much of a fuss about going back if his mother would guarantee to send him some chocolates and some of his favourite langue de chat biscuits.

  Pam Parish was also a happy member of a large family. Sometimes they all went to visit one of their grandmother’s seven brothers and sisters, the favourites being Charles and Frank Beadle, who had both made a lot of money developing warehouses at Erith on the Kent estuary.

  Charles’s wealth had bought him Wood Hall, a beautiful Georgian house in Essex, with a lovely farm filled with horses, sheep, pigs and cows. Uncle Charles was a generous man who paid for the founding of a school at Erith and for the laying of a gas pipe to the village. He loved nothing better than sending a big limousine for his relations and friends and bringing them all to celebrate Christmas at Wood Hall in style. Pam loved her Great-Uncle Charlie so much that she would do anything for him. One day she handed him her favourite embroidered handkerchief to fold, but mistaking her intention he thanked her and put it in his pocket. Pam said nothing. Uncle Charlie was the only person she could imagine forgiving for inadvertently stealing her favourite handkerchief. But one summer, after spending a few days at the farm recovering from having her tonsils out, Pam became surprisingly reluctant to return with her parents and brother and sisters on these once-treasured expeditions.

  Her mother could not get to the bottom of why Pam was making such a fuss about Uncle Charlie’s friend Mr Humbert who had also been staying. Mrs Parish did not know that this man had, on more than one occasion during her previous visit, taken Pam on his knee, and leaned his whole body firmly up against Pam in such a way that no one else could see quite how close he was to her. ‘I don’t know how you can be so unkind to that poor man who really likes little girls and has no little girls of his own,’ her baffled mother would say when Pam asked to stay behind while the rest of the family went to Uncle Charles’s. But Pam had begun to develop a profound distrust of grown-up men.

  Older children and teenagers had become accustomed to a far greater degree of independence than their parents had known, and this younger generation was unwilling to relinquish its new-found freedom. Face creams like ‘Icilma’ and ‘Silver Foam’, and pots of rouge, were hidden at the back of the bathroom cupboard. When the father of a young factory worker discovered his daughter’s Dorothy bag full of forbidden cosmetics, he accused her of polluting the house and threatened to throw her out if she didn’t dispose of’this muck’; she replied that she would either continue to use the muck or she and the muck would leave home together.

  For schoolchildren that summer, the news of a scientific development was confirmation enough that a new and better world was emerging. The world-famous Australian opera singer Nellie Melba was already a hugely popular figure before 1914, but her charity concerts during the war had endeared her for ever to the Australian and British people and she had been rewarded with a damehood. On 15 June she arrived at the Marconi Wireless recording studio in Chelmsford, Essex. There she was to sing to the British public in the first ever nationwide broadcast by wireless. Twelve years earlier radio had played a famous part in the country’s life when a distress call using Morse code was transmitted to nearby ships from the two radio operators on board the Titanic. As a result hundreds of lives had been saved from the engulfing waves. During the war wireless had been used by the Navy to track the movement of the German fleet. But these communications had been soundless and although amateur radio enthusiasts had managed to speak to each other over the airwaves, there had not yet been an official public broadcast.

  The ground-breaking occasion that summer of 1920 was sponsored by the Daily Mail, the newspaper once again in the vanguard of technological development. As the deep, slow-voiced announcer came to the microphone, an audience positioned just an inch or two from its wireless, and listening from a distance of up to a thousand miles from Chelmsford, was informed that Dame Nellie was about to sing. Atlantic liners with receiving equipment had been told of the fourthcoming ‘séance’, as some reports had it, and amateur wireless operators across the Channel and beyond tuned their sets.

  Wearing a modest hat and dark patterned suit, her handsome chest poised in readiness for the opening bars, Dame Nellie stood on a strip of red carpet with her small square handbag held securely in one hand while steadying the six-foot high microphone with the other. At the last minute an unforeseen adjustment became necessary. Technicians were conscious that Dame Nellie’s temper was volatile and that her celebrity made her at times demanding. There was a famous story of how the great Caruso had once teased Nellie for her occasional pomposity by singing ‘Che gelida manina, se la lasci riscaldar’ (‘what a tiny frozen hand, let me warm it’) while simultaneously pressing a hot sausage into Nellie’s palm.

  On this important day, however, the technicians were not going to risk anything going wrong with the broadcast and were prepared to make risky demands of Dame Nellie even if she objected. They were worried about the carpet. They feared that a rhythmic tap of a matronly foot on the deep pile might interfere with the purity and quality of the transmission. But as the carpet was rolled neatly back Dame Nellie made no objections and the sound of her glorious voice, accompanied on the adjacent grand piano by her friend the composer Herman Bemberg, came through with perfect clarity. The programme of music included the tear-jerking ‘Home Sweet Home’ that Nellie had sung to returning soldiers in 1918, just after receiving her damehood from the King. This song was followed by ‘Nymphes et Silvains’, and finally Mimi’s farewell from La Bohème preceded a resounding rendering of the National Anthem. Dame Nellie’s voice was heard by a marvelling audience as far away as Stockholm, Madrid, Warsaw, Paris, Rome and Malta.

  Nellie Melba stayed on in England for the new season of the Ballets Russes. Since her own operatic performances at Covent Garden the preceding May, and despite her disapproval of the audience’s informal dress, the seats had remained packed with opera lovers. On 10 June the seats were once again filled with ballet aficionados as Diaghilev returned to London and to the great opera house with Igor Stravinsky’s new ballet Pulcinella that had been premiere
d in Paris three weeks earlier. Pablo Picasso had painted the sets for a story based on an eighteenth-century Italian play, and once again London audiences ensured the ballets were a sell-out.

  This new season had been hugely anticipated for months. Classical ballet, under the guidance of Serge Diaghilev, was continuing the revolution in style and content that had begun in London three years before the war. Despite Emerald Cunard’s money-raising muscle, the expense of staging a production at Covent Garden remained impossible to meet with limited post-war funds. Instead the Ballets Russes had returned to London the preceding summer, opening at the less costly Coliseum.

  A colour poster with Picasso’s costume design for a character in one of the ballets had been pasted up all over the West End and throughout the Underground. Picasso himself had enjoyed an extended visit to London in the summer of 1919, staying with his new wife Olga Khokhlova at the Savoy and flaunting a fresh flower from the nearby Covent Garden market in the lapel of his new London-tailored suit. Picasso and Matisse were two artists out of only a handful whose reputation had been made before the war and whose creative originality and renown was extending beyond the Armistice. Picasso’s visit had been centred around his commission by Diaghilev for the backdrops of The Three-Cornered Hat, which had its premiere at the Coliseum on 22 July that year. It formed part of a summer season which included the triumphant – some critics even thought perfect – production of La Boutique Fantasque. The new post-war stars of Diaghilev’s stage, Léonide Massine and Lydia Lopokova, were greeted with as much rapture as had been lavished on the company at its first appearance with Nijinsky and Karsavina nearly a decade earlier.

  Picasso had been both amused and flattered when he read in the Weekly Despatch that his poster had been ‘defiled by the wretched scribbles of street urchins’ who had added a beard and moustache to the picture. He saw the graffiti as part of the exciting and lively street art that he had come across in London, finding himself as ‘charmed by the naiveté of these efforts’, which he thought ‘most instructive’, as he was by London buses and the scarlet uniform of the British soldier on guard outside Buckingham Palace. During Picasso’s London stay Sacheverell Sitwell had climbed the narrow ladder to the top floor to visit him in the studio at 48 Floral Street and watched the carpet-slippered painter at work on the enormous backdrops for The Three-Cornered Hat – backdrops distinctive for their flamboyant use of colour combined with a pared-down and effective simplicity of composition. Seeing the artist ‘moving about at a great speed over its surface, walking with something of a skating motion’, Sitwell was prompted, in an outburst of excitement, to compare the scene to that of watching Tiepolo at work.

  Later that autumn another new ballet had attracted huge crowds. Audiences at the Empire, Leicester Square, had been thrilled by Jean Cocteau’s creatively daring composition of 1917, Parade. Set, curtains and costumes had again been conceived by the young painter Picasso; music was by Erik Satie, choreography by Léonide Massine and programme notes by the poet Guillaume Apollinaire. The leading ballerina was the popular Tamara Karsavina who played an ultramodern American dancing girl.

  Critics called the ballet variously ‘a revolution’, ‘a comet’, ‘an earthquake’. Massine, who was the company’s leading male dancer as well as choreographer, explained that, in their attempt to translate popular art into a new form, the combined creative team used ‘certain elements of contemporary show business – ragtime music, jazz, the cinema, billboard advertising, circus and music-hall techniques’, as well as musical references to the aeroplane, the typewriter and the skyscraper.

  The Times critic was challenged to find the words to describe what he had seen. ‘Cubo-futurist? Physical vers-libre? Plastic jazz?’ he suggested, concluding that ‘It is a world of nonsense, where anything means everything or nothing, yet everything is exciting to the eye, ear and mind.’ But the audiences were large and Diaghilev wrote to Picasso from his suite of rooms at the Savoy telling him that London life was ‘tres animé – on ne manque de rien on est bien chauffé et nourri’ and adding that ‘Les thé âtres marchent mieux que jamais et nous travaillons comme des nègres.’

  Audiences included the wife of the former prime minister, Margot Asquith. Her memoirs, ‘an immortal addition to the chronicles of the super-egoists’ according to the Illustrated London News, had just been published and were the talk of society. The critic Clive Bell, the Sitwell brothers and the poet T. S. Eliot with his wife Vivien had all been with Margot Asquith to watch the new performance. Vanessa Bell sent a message to Picasso who was by then back in Paris to say it was ‘the best thing I have ever seen on stage’, containing ‘everything and nothing’. Parade held particular resonance for T. S. Eliot, who was working on his new long poem, The Waste Land: the arid post-war landscape of moral and spiritual apathy and stagnation was his inspiration and obsession.

  Some of the dancers who had arrived a few weeks earlier for rehearsals for the 1920 summer season were staying at the Savoy, the Russian dancers’ favourite hotel close to Covent Garden. They were mildly amused, though mildly inconvenienced, by the Savoy button boys who had finally summoned the courage to go on strike. But unlike the disgruntled senior staff who remained angry about the anomalies in the tipping system and had gone on strike several months earlier, the younger employees had a different grievance. The boys, increasingly fed up with the poor quality of food served during their rest breaks, objected in particular to the gristly lumps of cold mutton that was frequently presented in the guise of an edible lunch. On 25 May sixteen small boys had walked out of the main hotel entrance and crossed the Strand, skipping their way towards the excellent tea rooms opposite. In only two mouth-watering hours they succeeded in spending their entire and carefully collected strike fund on tarts, buns, tea and cocoa.

  During the stand-off a group of senior staff had been drafted to walk the long corridors and the reception rooms while intoning the room number of a guest to alert him that a visitor had arrived. The baritone delivery was not sufficiently audible to many of the older guests whose hearing was no longer so strong. The management, realising the value of the button boys’ treble and alto voices, quickly agreed to give the boys the best food that the Savoy kitchen could provide in return for constant and willing service. Members of the Ballets Russes were among those who were pleased that things were back to normal.

  But while a certain nostalgia was satisfied by the return of the glorious pre-war ballet seasons, and while youth and the press were exhilarated by scientific excitement in the airwaves, many still struggled with the challenge of the new era. News of the worrying fragmentation of Germany filled the papers. Extremist militant groups were emerging all over the country. The Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, the German Workers’ Party, founded in Bavaria in January 1919, was demonstrating an increasing hostility to capitalism and Jews. The party was growing in number of supporters and a young ex-corporal, Adolf Hitler, who had recovered from a blinding wartime gas attack, had recently joined them – their fifty-fifth member. Other groups were demonstrating against Bolshevism. The economy teetered. A general strike paralysed the country.

  At home a controversial film was attracting crowds and comment in the cinemas. French director Abel Gance’s raging damnation of the futility of war, J’accuse, was shown to its first British audience on 24 May 1920 at London’s Philharmonic Hall in Great Portland Street. Six months earlier the Philharmonic audience had seen Lowell Thomas’s Lawrence of Arabia show, but since December Sir Ernest Shackleton’s film South had been presented in person by the exhausted, frustrated and increasingly alcohol-dependent explorer.

  Gance’s film was something very different. Accompanied by a full choir and a forty-piece orchestra, it starred two men from a village in Provence who, despite being rivals in love, put aside their enmity and fought together in the war. As the lyrical beauty of the opening pastoral scenes gave way to the harsh barren openness of no man’s land, audiences realised that this was not simply a war film, but a tale
about love, self-sacrifice and the fragility of survival. Gance had filmed the final tragic war scenes in the north-eastern town of Saint-Mihiel on 12 September 1918 during the actual battle in which over seven thousand soldiers were killed or wounded.

  A French general watching Gance during the filming asked him whom he was accusing. ‘I am accusing War,’ Gance replied. ‘I am accusing Man. I am accusing universal stupidity.’ The film magazine Kine Weekly said that ‘J’accuse forms one of the most terrible indictments against war which it is possible to imagine’, explaining that ‘the effect is not produced by insistent horrors and sheer frightfulness’ but ‘by the emphasis of simple natural humanity’.

  J’accuse was shown in cinemas throughout the country. The Times thought that a ‘miracle has been achieved. A film has caused an audience to think.’ No one who saw it could put the film’s message from their minds. No one missed the title’s echoes of Emile Zola’s defence of the soldier Alfred Dreyfus twenty years earlier against anti-Semitic victimisation by the French government. If individuals could reconcile their differences, why did such a solution evade the politicians? What in fact had been the point of war? The content of the film reminded audiences of American director D. W Griffith’s huge wartime success, The Birth of a Nation, in which the American Civil War was celebrated while war itself was resoundingly condemned.