A Brief History of Britain 1851-2010

by Jeremy Black

  Much of this focused on the First World War. The ‘lost generation’ and the futility of this war were myths so deeply imbedded in popular consciousness that, for some, they became irrefutable facts, as well as folk memory passed down through families, and any scholarly attempt to disabuse believers was treated with hostility.

  In many respects, this response, already seen in the 1930s, continues to mould the more general perception of war held by a society that is singularly lacking in bellicosity. This is linked to the need to adopt a moralistic attitude to foreign military commitments in order to win support for them, a marked characteristic of the politics of the 1990s and 2000s.

  If these circumstances provide an important element of contemporary strategic culture, it is far from apparent how the situation may change in the future. The implications of terrorism, growing European Union direction, not least after the Lisbon Treaty came into force in 2009, and resource crises on military activity are all unclear; a situation which underlines the need, when looking at the past, present and future, to avoid both the pitfalls of clear-cut accounts of change, and determinism. For example, the aftermath of the military commitment to Afghanistan, which itself became increasingly problematic in military and political terms in 2009, is uncertain.

  Economic Changes

  Political and strategic changes in Britain’s international position were accompanied by major shifts in other respects, both economic and cultural. In particular, the empire’s role as an economic partner and support ceased. In 1935–9, the empire took 49 per cent of British exports, and, until the 1967 devaluation of sterling, the currencies of most Commonwealth countries, bar Canada, were fixed in value relative to sterling, and they conducted their international trade in sterling. Moreover, many of these states held large sterling balances, which helped support the currency, just as today foreign holdings of dollars support that currency. The role of sterling, however, declined alongside Britain’s economic and military position.

  This process was notable in the former empire. The US replaced Britain as the biggest source of foreign investment in Canada in the 1920s, and as Canada’s biggest export market after the Second World War. Australia came increasingly to look to east Asia for economic partners. Moreover, Britain’s economic place in Asia was substantially reduced in the second half of the century. This was the case both in former colonies, such as India and Malaya, where the role of British companies declined, and in other countries, notably China and Iran, where Britain’s role had been important.

  Yet, despite the loss of empire, the British economy still differed from that of Continental Europe. The special financial status and influence of the City of London was distinctive. Even in relative decline, notably compared to its position in the 1920s, the City proved effective at developing trading in new financial instruments such as Eurobonds, futures and derivatives. Partly as a result, the City became more prominent in the British economy and also more closely linked into a world network of financial centres, the other key points in which were New York, Tokyo and Hong Kong. London benefited from its time zones which enabled it to do business while New York, Tokyo and Hong Kong were open.

  At the same time, the City’s financial place within Europe was challenged by Frankfurt, although, as part of this challenge, German and Swiss banks established themselves in London, in part by purchasing British merchant banks. Indeed, the effectiveness of the City, despite the relative decline of the British economy and the loss of sterling’s role as a stable international reserve currency, owed much to the liberal attitude of the Thatcher government to the growing role of overseas banks in the City.

  Substantial fortunes were made, helping fuel the property market in London, while a speculative building boom changed the face of the City. The functionalism of large, open trading floors prevailed in skyscrapers such as the NatWest Tower and 30 St Mary Axe (the ‘erotic gherkin’).

  There were, therefore, significant changes in Britain’s economic relationship with the rest of the world. These affected the world of goods, which was important to the sense of identity. As imports of manufactured goods became greater, especially after the Second World War, so British products became less distinctive and characteristic. In addition, within Britain, they became less effective as signifiers of style and quality.

  American Influence

  The impact of American cinema was particularly prominent. British culture, history and society were interpreted and presented for American, and thus, also British, audiences by American actors, directors and writers, or by their British counterparts responding to the American market. Thus, Dorothy L. Sayers’ (1893–1957) Lord Peter Wimsey, a fictional epitome of the best of the British aristocracy, was played by an American, Robert Montgomery, in Busman’s Honeymoon (1940). George Orwell referred to the pressure of Americanization and the dissolution of values in the war years when, in his essay ‘Decline of the English Murder’ (1946), he contrasted a recent case with the years 1850–1925, which he characterized as the age of ‘the old domestic poisoning dramas, product of a stable society where the all-prevailing hypocrisy did at least ensure that crimes as serious as murder should have strong emotions behind them’.

  American links, a positive image of the US, and a habit of looking at Britain through the American prism were all greatly accentuated by the Second World War, and were maintained in the Cold War. President Truman’s (1884–1972) Democratic administration (1945–53) was far from identical with the Attlee Labour governments (1945–51), with their nationalizations and creation of a welfare state, but it was possible to stress a common language and values, certainly in comparison with the Communist Soviet Union. Moreover, the American emphasis on the free market appealed to more groups in British society, not least to commercial interests, than the more statist and bureaucratic Continental European societies did.

  In practice, cooperation with the US did not separate Britain from the Continent. Other European states were also founder members of NATO, American economic assistance under the Marshall Plan was important in the recovery of Western Europe, and the Americans played a role in thwarting Communist activity in France and Italy. Cultural Anglo-Americanism was matched by closer links between America and Western Europe as a whole. Their cultures weakened or discredited by defeat, collaboration or exhaustion, much of Western European society was reshaped in response to American influences and consumerism, which were associated with prosperity, fashion and glamour. Britain’s economy and society were wide open to the stimuli coming from the most developed and powerful global economy.

  At the same time, the impact of empire declined. Britain’s cultural, social and political influence in former imperial possessions ebbed rapidly. The percentage of the Australian and Canadian populations that could claim British descent fell appreciably from 1945, as they welcomed immigration from other countries, for example Greeks and East Asians into Australia. America came to play a more prominent role in British culture, with American soap operas being shown frequently on television. In some respects, the US served as a surrogate for empire, for both Britain and the Dominions, providing crucial military, political, economic and cultural links, and offering an important model. Encouraged by the role of American programmes on British television, and American or American-derived products in British consumer society, the American presence in the British economy, and the more diffuse, but still important, mystique of America as a land of wealth and excitement, grew. America thus became very important to British culture in the widest sense of the term, and helped to alter the latter.

  The suburban culture and society that was prominent in Britain in the 1950s was particularly accessible to American influences. This trend was seen in popular music, for example the songs of Perry Como (1912–2001) and Elvis Presley (1935–77), the cult of the car, the use of ‘white goods’, especially washing-machines, and electricity (rather than coal), the rise of television, and a suburbia of modern detached houses. Through popular music and the increasin
gly ubiquitous television, American influence grew rapidly in the 1950s. It became the currency of the affluence that replaced the austerity of the 1940s. American soap operas and comedy programmes set standards for consumer society, notably in female clothes and hair and household accessories. While the US was a model of individualism and, albeit to a lesser extent, for democratization, the consumerism was particularly apparent, and not least with iconic television shows, from I Love Lucy in the 1950s to Dallas in the 1980s. These series took forward the role of film in the inter-war years in proposing a model of fashionable and comfortable living that was open to ‘ordinary people’, as opposed to the idea that such living should be derived from the habits and hobbies of an ancestral social elite, which had been the British pattern in the nineteenth century. American ‘soap operas’ were generally set in spacious housing, mostly in suburbia, and they provided a pattern of life for suburban, car-owning Britons.

  Competing Identities

  There were also important Continental intellectual and cultural influences, in part stemming from the large number of refugees who fled the traumas of its politics, notably Jews who entered Britain in the 1930s. If this process entailed an openness to Continental influences, it did not, however, imply a sympathy for political developments there. Immigrant professors and architects can be more widely influential than might be apparent at first glance, but, nevertheless, their influence is generally indirect.

  There have also been more direct links between Britain and the Continent, of which one of the most important has been tourism. To an unprecedented extent, much of the British population, male and female, young and old, became aware that there is an ‘other’: other places, other peoples, and other ways of organizing life. The impact of such experience was lessened by many of the aspects of package holidays (in which travel, accommodation and, often, meals were sold as a unit by a British travel agent), specifically going abroad to ‘cocoons’, environments in which the foreign is tamed or lessened, and in which there are aspects of Britishness, not least other British tourists.

  In the first half of the twentieth century, although the 1938 Holidays With Pay Act provided a legislative support for leisure, tourism was limited due to war and the relatively high cost of foreign travel. Moreover, fashion and habit helped to restrict the lure of abroad. Thus, the working class was apt to go to the seaside resorts developed in the Victorian period, such as Blackpool, Skegness and Southend, while, with the social divisions characteristic of Britain (and other countries), much of the middle class went to more ‘select’ coastal resorts such as Sidmouth and Torquay on the ‘English Riviera’. The more affluent were familiar with the Alps or the French Riviera.

  In contrast, far greater numbers travelled for pleasure from the late 1950s, a consequence of greater disposable wealth among the working class, especially skilled artisans, the development of the package holiday, the use of jet aircraft, in which Britain played a key innovative role, and the spread of car ownership. As a consequence, although a large number never went abroad, in part because of poverty, far more inhabitants of Britain than ever before visited the Continent. Furthermore, unprecedented numbers made a regular habit of doing so, and some went several times a year. If many visited ‘little Britain’ in resorts such as Benidorm in Spain, which was purpose-built from the 1960s to cater to the mass-tourism market, others did not. Exotic holidays on low-cost airlines or cruise ships subsequently became more common.

  Moreover, a growing percentage of the population chose to live abroad, especially in retirement, or had second homes there. This became particularly the case in France and Spain in the 1980s and 1990s, and was a consequence of the liberalization of financial controls under Thatcher. It became easier to transfer funds abroad and to own foreign bank accounts.

  Such links were an important aspect of a reconceptualization of relations with the Continent in which the latter became more familiar. This familiarity was related to a shift in the notion of patriotism. Patriotic sentiment was less frequently expressed from the 1960s, and attitudes towards abroad became less adversarial. The extent to which major football teams, for example Arsenal and Chelsea, had foreign players and managers was particularly notable in the 2000s.

  Thus, notions of identity and habits of expressing identity were both in flux in the closing decades of the century and in the 2000s. It would be mistaken to pretend that they had ever been constant, but the last half-century was one of particular fluidity. The loss of empire, the lasting alliance with the US, and membership of the European Union, were all far more than simply political issues.

  In the 1990s and 2000s, issues of identity focused on Europe. Britain was, and is, a European country, affected by similar social, and other, trends as the other countries. That, however, did not mean that British participation in the movement that successively spawned the EEC, EC and EU should be seen as inevitable. Europe could, and can, have different, indeed very different, forms and meanings, and it is difficult to argue that they were, and are, inevitably reduced to the EU, and in its current form. The Swiss and Norwegians are Europeans but not members of the EU.

  Moreover, although some opponents of the movement for European unification might have been self-confessed ‘Little Englanders’, others could legitimately claim that they were in no way ‘anti-European’, but simply wanted to see ‘Europe’ developing along different lines, which was Thatcher’s position. In addition, she prided herself on the role that Western firmness had played in the freeing of Eastern Europe from Soviet hegemony and Communism. Nevertheless, the identification of Europe with the EEC and, even more, the EC and the EU, had a major impact in British discussion, such that Thatcher’s views led to her being presented as ‘anti-European’.

  More generally, openness to the outside world became more intense in the twentieth century, and did so as part of the process of accelerating change that characterized the age. That, however, should not lead us to assume that shifts in national identity have largely been a response simply to this changing relationship. It is also important to note changes within Britain, both between, and within, areas and social groups, so that the impact of the outside world rested in part on its interrelationship with developments within Britain.

  Thus, in the 1950s, the availability of American role models, such as James Dean (1931–55) and Elvis Presley, was important in the definition of youth identity, while youth culture was transformed when rock ’n’ roll arrived with the playing of Bill Haley and the Comets on the soundtrack of the film Blackboard Jungle, which was released in Britain in 1956. The growing cult of youth helped explain the importance of these models. Indeed, in the 1960s this cult focused on The Beatles, who listened to imported American records but were not American.

  Thanks to film, television and travel, the immediacy of foreign exemplars became more urgent, but this was more than a matter simply of opportunity. In addition, there was an important loss of confidence within Britain that encouraged the search for foreign models. This was not new – Germany had been an important source of models in the late nineteenth century, one, for example, advocated by Prince Albert – but the search became more insistent. The process was facilitated by the presentation of the US as an ideal in both film and television. This was the most important source of change in terms of Britain’s relations with the outside world, in large part because this presentation of the US as an ideal drove expectations and habits within Britain. Britain was an ally of the US, not simply in political and military, but also in wider social and cultural terms, unlike say, American allies such as Saudi Arabia.

  The sway of American culture was such that the shift from the period of British great power status to that of American hegemony, a shift accomplished in the 1940s, and with the consequences readily apparent in the 1950s, was managed without conflict. The process of decline was largely hidden from British eyes, and most of the public adapted to the consequences, a situation eased not only by the American alliance but also, from the 1970s, by the
availability of North Sea oil, which enabled Britain to continue without addressing fundamental structural problems. The loss of great power status proved far harder for British politicians than for the public, but the major role of the state in the domestic economy and in social welfare was such that the politicians also had a difficult domestic agenda to address.

  Multiculturalism

  Neither the US nor power politics were the sole issues in Britain’s engagement with the wider world. For example, the nation’s diet changed greatly. There is now greater consumption, via restaurants and supermarkets, of products and dishes from around the world, notably Chinese, Indian and Thai cuisine, which reflects the extent to which the British have become less parochial and readier to adopt an open attitude – although these cuisines had to be adapted to British tastes. Indeed, British travellers in India and China swiftly realized that the restaurants in Britain were different, not only in providing more meat but also in offering tastes and dishes that were believed to be appropriate for the British palate.

  Increased foreign travel and intermarriage are further aspects of a relatively unxenophobic and continually changing society, most of which was anyway far less prejudiced and racist than critics frequently suggested. Indeed, a tolerant multiculturalism characterizes much of British life, and is one definition of its society. Multiculturalism itself is a ping-pong issue, swinging back and forth between tolerance and diversity on the one hand and pressure for integration and full participation in Britishness on the other. Nevertheless, to contrast Britain with countries from which it receives many immigrants, Britain is more tolerant than Muslim societies, while the attitude towards homosexuality is far harsher in many countries, including Jamaica and Nigeria. The open-ended nature of British society, the sense that change and continuity are a joint dynamic, has been under challenge from differing definitions of this dynamic; but there was, and is, an overall willingness to accept this formulation of nation and country as tolerant.