The Making of Modern Britain

by Andrew Marr

  At a less extreme level, the fresh-air tendency had its hikers, cyclists and, of course, Britain’s vast new youth movement, the Boy Scouts. Sir Robert Baden-Powell’s first experiment with a Scout camp happened in 1907, on Brownsea Island in Dorset, and his book Scouting for Boys, which is said to be the fourth most popular in the world (after the Bible, the Quran and Mao’s Little Red Book) came out the following year. But it was in the twenties that Scouting reached the zenith of its prestige. Its original mixture of patriotism, a whiff of the military and outdoor adventures for urban children made this a ‘how shall we live?’ movement shorn of the sexual and political issues of adult back-to-the-landers. In these years, clusters of small ex-army tents full of working-class boys ruled over by wiry ex-military Scoutmasters could be found in woods across Britain, a Union Jack hanging from a nearby tree. In city streets, small boys carrying whistles and sticks, dressed in the khaki shirt, shorts and floppy hats which Baden-Powell had copied from the South African police force, marched around looking for opportunities to carry out good deeds.

  The first international Scout Jamboree took place in 1920 and afterwards Baden-Powell was solemnly declared Chief Scout of the World. A year later he was created a baronet. Scouting was a rare British cultural export. The imperialism and jingoism of the pre-war movement was replaced by a new emphasis on internationalism and brotherhood, and by 1922 there were 3 million Scouts in thirty-two countries. One early convert was a young Lake District artist called John Hargrave, who supplied the drawings for John Buchan’s novels. Impoverished and a Quaker, Hargrave moved to London, where he became a newspaper cartoonist and writer on Scouting under the name White Fox. He rose fast through the Scouting movement and was seen as an obvious successor to Baden-Powell. But Hargrave, a pacifist, fell out with the military hero and in 1920 was expelled from the Scouts. Hargrave was at least as naturally autocratic and charismatic as B-P himself and immediately set up a rival organization, the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift, taking the name from the Old Kentish for ‘great strength’. They were organized in clans, tribes and ‘rooftrees’ and expected to make their own clothes, including Saxon cloaks, jerkins, shorts and hoods. They mingled the Nordic and the Red Indian yet have also been described as the only genuinely English national movement of modern times. Like the Scouts, they camped, using Hargrave’s original design of a lightweight, one-person tent. On ceremonial occasions such as their annual Whitsun gathering, the Althing, they wore luridly coloured robes and carried freakish totem poles with carved skulls, animals and eagles. Though we have learned to distrust organizations with too many K’s in their name, Kibbo Kift were for world peace, handcrafts and ritual. Open-air living would redeem the spirit, broken by war and industrialism. Hargrave expected more war and the eventual collapse of civilization – just like many Marxists and Christians – and saw the Kibbo Kift as an elite group who would survive to pick up the pieces and create a new civilization.

  They were part of a wider post-war movement which was particularly strong in Weimar Germany, where the Wandervogel youth groups set off for the mountains and forests to recover a sense of themselves they felt had been lost in the cities and the detritus of defeat. There was much interest in folklore, folk dancing, ‘pure’ local food and nudism and the groups in turn influenced early Nazi youth culture, the so-called blood-and-soil national socialism. The pre-war German Wandervogel had been visited by an Englishman with Austrian and Scandinavian blood in his veins. Rolf Gardiner had been brought up in Berlin and later at the progressive boarding school Bedales and Cambridge. He shared the Wandervogel interest in folk music and folk dancing. Today folk dancing has a bland, often derided image best summed up in the remark by the composer Arnold Bax that you should try everything once, ‘always excepting incest and folk dancing’. But for idealistic radicals in the early decades of the twentieth century, the people needed to go back to their rural origins, re-learn the old songs and the old dances and get away from the imported dance bands and the entertainment industry. Gardiner’s dancing was wild and even angry, and he championed sword-dancing against the gentler dances favoured by the folk revivalists of Edwardian England. For Gardiner, dancing was a cult, and cleansed the soul.

  After the Great War, Gardiner fell in with Kibbo Kift. By now his political vision had expanded. He believed in a union between the German, British and Scandinavian peoples, a Northern Federation, to replace the dirty business of empire and the influence of American consumer culture. He also thought it was essential to return to the soil, and for Britain to become self-sufficient in food again, reversing the decline of the countryside. Going his own way, he fell out with Hargrave and left Kibbo Kift, protesting that it failed to fully believe ‘in blood contact with the living past of the English earth’.114 At the same time he had become friendly with D. H. Lawrence, visiting him in France and exchanging long letters. Lawrence wanted Gardiner to create a community which could express some of his own ideas; and Gardiner established himself in some mill buildings by a farm on the edge of Cranbourne Chase in Dorset. A skilled farmer and forester, he reclaimed much ravaged land. In the thirties he ran regular voluntary work-camps as the centrepiece of his ‘Springhead Kinship’, with ritual dances for unemployed people, local farm workers and urban youth, gongs to mark the times of day, and flapping overhead the Cross of St George with a Wessex dragon on it. Gardiner was a serious man, involved in the Country Landowners Association and a county councillor. But frequent visits by Germans were leading him towards dark and treacherous waters. He wrote an admiring letter to Goebbels in 1933 and as late as 1939 was teaching ‘ceremonial dances’ to storm troopers and SS men. Yet he was himself partly Jewish and argued at the same time that the Nazi regime was itself corruptly corporate and aggressive. He seemed unable to disentangle his life-long love of Germany from its new regime. Gardiner’s deepest interest, however, was in the soil and farming. Planting forests and pursuing organic ideas, he was far ahead of his time in that at least. He went on to found Kinship in Husbandry during the war, an organization dedicated to reclaiming the countryside for traditional farming, which in turn founded the Soil Association after the war. Gardiner later became one of the earliest campaigners against factory farming and the European quota system, and in favour of sustainable development. Every time a British shopper picks up a bag of potatoes or a loaf with the distinctive Soil Association symbol on it, they are unwittingly connecting to a line of thinking that includes boys leaping around doing sword dances, and even prancing storm troopers.

  For millions who had no interest in creating a new world civilization, this was also a great age of going tramping and camping. For every cult and home-made messiah there were hundreds of groups interested only in fresh air and rediscovering their own country. Partly this was thanks to that unbucolic invention, the motor car, which allowed people to reach parts of the country they had never seen before, and then camp on them – something which delighted hard-up farmers and infuriated landowners. In 1919 Baden-Powell became president of the Camping Club of Great Britain and Ireland, which held its first Club Feast of Lanterns at Deep Dene in Dorking in 1921 – Chinese lanterns rather than Indian tents and Nordic headdresses, but yet a more bosky ritual. The first non-gypsy caravans were soon taking to the road, often hand-made out of ash wood and the salvaged remains of old cars. The wandering gypsy life had been much romanticized; now the open road was available to middle-class adventurers. Motorized charabancs, early open-topped buses (the word is French for carriage-with-benches; the first charabancs were horse-drawn), brought poorer city-dwellers to the countryside for a day out. For the more active working-class enthusiasts there were the ramblers’ and hikers’ groups – and these were also more political.

  Bennie Rothman had been a scholarship boy at Manchester’s Central High School, having arrived in the city from the United States with his Jewish-Romanian parents. At the city’s Clarion Café, he met socialists of all kinds and soon joined the Young Communist League and then its offshoot, the B
ritish Workers’ Sports Federation. Weekend camps in Derbyshire followed, with Marx and socialist sing-songs around these campfires. During one, Rothman was aggressively ordered off the land by a gamekeeper. He began to plot a mass trespass in protest. By this stage it was estimated that, every weekend, some 35,000 people were leaving Manchester with boots, mackintoshes and haversacks to spend their free time rambling. Though rambling or hiking had begun in late-Victorian times, it was only after the war that big ramblers’ federations were formed in the main cities – Manchester in 1919, Liverpool in 1922, Sheffield in 1926 – to help working-class people reach the open spaces. The national ramblers’ organization arrived in 1931, the year before Rothman’s rebellion. Around 500 people gathered at a quarry, accompanied by many local police, and began to set off across the grouse moors to the Peak District’s highest point, Kinder Scout. There were scuffles and ‘riotous assembly’ was deemed to have been caused. The twenty-year-old Bennie Rothman and five others were arrested, tried at Derby assizes by juries including two brigadier generals, three colonels, two majors, three captains, two aldermen and eleven country gentlemen, and sent to prison. Another man on the trespass was a teenage Salford communist who would later become famous as the folk singer Ewan MacColl: his song ‘The Manchester Rambler’ gives some of the spirit of the time. Its chorus celebrates the ‘wage slave on Monday’ who is a ‘free man on Sunday’ but who is confronted by a furious gamekeeper:

  He called me a louse and said ‘Think of the grouse’.

  Well I thought, but I still couldn’t see

  Why old Kinder Scout and the moors round about

  Couldn’t take both the poor grouse and me.

  He said ‘All this land is my master’s’.

  At that I stood shaking my head,

  No man has the right to own mountains

  Any more than the deep ocean bed.

  Bennie Rothman, it should be added, left prison to continue a life of political activism, including serving with the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War and campaigning against Conservative policies on the countryside in the Thatcher years. Still rambling into late old age, he lived until 2002.

  So it was possible to be a ruralist fascist or a ruralist communist or anything in between. We should beware of connecting the huge back-to-nature movement of the inter-war years too closely to the dislocating impact of the Great War. It clearly had some effect in persuading would-be leaders and mystics that civilization was smashed and had to be redeemed far from the cities. But Britain was also then, as it is now, a small and crowded country. Its population was almost 30 million fewer but most people were crowded more hotly, smokily and intensely into city centres; fresh air and space were just as alluring as they are now. As the world’s first industrialized nation, Britain had lost much of herself in the previous hundred years – the intimate sense of place, the old skills, crafts, dances, songs and dialect. Many of those who pulled on old army shorts and set off to rediscover themselves were certainly eccentric. Part of the background noise of the twenties is chanting in forests and the clatter of sword dances. But they were not all mad and they were not always wrong.

  Heroes of Speed

  Britain might have been struggling economically and worried already about her future as a great power, but in answering the charge that she had become ‘effete’ many pointed to her heroes of speed. For quite a few of the inter-war years Britons held the world speed records in the air, on land and on water – and Britain had the speed record for trains, too. This mattered not only as a source of national pride, at least at a magazine-reading, cigarette card-collecting level, but also because it demonstrated that British engineering remained world class, if not in mass manufacturing then certainly at the adventurous tip. And the heroes were indeed a little larger than life. Through the twenties, for instance, the world land and water speed records were fought for, and dominated by, two former Royal Flying Corps pilots, Malcolm Campbell and Sir Henry O’Neal de Hane Segrave. Campbell was a gung-ho character, the son of a Hatton Garden diamond merchant who progressed from bikes to motorbikes, from them to fast cars and from cars to flying. After a wartime career as a fighter pilot he returned to his speed obsession. He was not, by and large, a culture vulture but as a young man he did go to see Maurice Maeterlinck’s tedious symbolist play The Blue Bird and was impressed enough to call all his subsequent cars Blue Bird, handing the name on to his son Donald, famously killed trying for another water speed record in 1967. The older Campbell has been a little eclipsed by the younger, more by the hypnotic quality of the film of that final crash than from any fair assessment. Malcolm Campbell was a huge hero between the wars, his chiselled, long-chinned face familiar across Europe and America, appearing on German postcards, recorded in Tintin drawings and advertising everything from motor oil to American cigarettes. He took the world land speed record for the first time in 1924 on Pendine Sands in Wales driving a Sunbeam, then partly designed his own Campbell-Napier Blue Bird, winning it again in 1927.

  Enter, on a Florida beach, his great rival Henry Segrave, another boy’s own heroic type, an Etonian who had fought in the war as a machine gunner and then a fighter pilot, being badly wounded twice. The first Briton to win a Grand Prix race in a British car, Segrave had decided to also become the first man to travel on land at more than 200 m.p.h. Much mocked for boasting about the impossible, he achieved it in March 1927 in his Mystery Sunbeam. Campbell responded by moving to Daytona Beach too, and reaching 206 m.p.h.; but Segrave was soon back in his Golden Arrow, which used the latest Napier aircraft engine, getting to 230 m.p.h. in 1929. Then, with Britons holding both the air and land speed records, Segrave mounted a huge new Rolls-Royce aero engine in a specially designed boat to take the world water speed record. On Friday 13 June 1930, on Lake Windermere, he duly achieved that too, before hitting a log and crashing. Dragged from the water and rushed to hospital, he asked his wife whether he had set a world record and, told that he had, promptly died in her arms. Campbell’s great rival had gone, but he kept going with ever faster cars and boats. Moving to the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, in 1935 he became the first man to drive at more than 300 m.p.h. Then, like Segrave, Campbell turned his attention to water speed records, getting the world record in 1937 and again, just weeks before the next war broke out, in 1939 too. He died of cancer shortly after the war, an undramatic ending, though his son’s spectacular crash in the last Campbell Blue Bird made up for that.

  Campbell was claimed by the fascists as a supporter of the BUF and Mosley, but Campbell was also an early Cassandra about the coming war with Nazi Germany, fiercely hostile to Hitler and a propagandist for good air-raid preparations. What is certainly true is that there was a strong connection between pilots and right-wing politics, too strong to be entirely coincidental, and presumably to do with a sense of destiny felt by early fliers looking down on the smudged and smoky lands below. In the Schneider Trophy races of the twenties and early thirties, national speed competition also led directly to some of the key fighter planes of the next war. The trophy, for seaplanes and with complicated rules, had been established by a Frenchman before the Great War but the most spectacular races were run after it, and dominated by Mussolini’s Italy, the United States and Britain. After a badly run race at Bournemouth, many of the contests took place off Venice and Baltimore, with the national air forces of all the countries struggling for superiority. Britain’s first Supermarine victory came in 1921, but it was really in three races – 1927, 1929 and 1931 – that sleek Supermarine seaplanes, designed by R. J. Mitchell and using new engines by our old friend Royce, finally stamped British victory. Three consecutive wins – the race was run every second year – meant that under the rules the trophy went permanently to Britain. More important, Reginald Mitchell went on to design the Spitfire, using what he had learned from the Schneider winners, before he died of cancer in 1935.

  So the speed maniacs mattered, in the direct sense that their enthusiasms kept national designers and en
gineers working at a pitch of development which would affect the war to come. They also mattered for national morale. Even something so unwarlike as the achievement of the London and North-Eastern Railway Company’s Mallard locomotive, which in 1938 became (and remains) the fastest steam train ever, had an impact on how people felt about being British. For Mallard, designed by LNER’s chief Sir Nigel Gresley, not only had the sleek, striking look of the era – not so different from a Supermarine seaplane, in a way, nor one of the Campbell Blue Birds – but also seized the record from a rival express locomotive made in Nazi Germany. Did the boys collecting pictures of Mallard on cigarette cards or jigsaw puzzles know this? Naturally. It was a time when politics saturated even the world of the trainspotters. The thirties are sometimes painted as the decade of pacifist Oxford intellectuals and communist fellow-travellers, which is true, but they were also the time of right-wing speed maniacs, far better known in their day, who were planning for the next big fight.