by A. N. Wilson
Clearly, the wealth created by these companies extended far beyond the immediate confines of their offices and factory gates. Investments of private individuals and corporations, and ultimately the stability of governments and whole societies, came to depend upon the health of international capital. ‘We are in the presence of a new organization of society,’ moaned President Wilson in 1919. ‘Our life has broken away from the past.’7 He was just as gloomy about the prospect of businessmen replacing statesmen as T. S. Eliot, or Belloc and Chesterton or Good Ole Ezra might have been.
But no matter whether they liked what had happened, or understood it, the men and women of the 1920s were in a new world, one where for many the Company, the Firm, was in effect the political and economic unit to which they belonged. This was as true of a Birmingham chocolate worker who lived in Bournville, the model village created by the Quaker cocoa kings the Cadbury family, as it was for the Welsh miner living in a valley where the only work was down the pits. When life was prosperous, it could be seen that ever-expanding industrial capitalism was the cause of that prosperity. But what protection existed for the victims of its voracious profit-appetite, its ruthless preparedness to strip assets, throw employees out of work, destroy commercial rivals? The wage-slaves, fearful of unemployment, crowd into the factories to work longer and longer hours for more and more limited wages, to produce quantities of stuff which perhaps the world does not need, in order to make money for the very few; and all, as Ezra says in The ABC of Economics, because ‘some fool or skunk plays mean’. This was the nub of the fear which made the people of those times become Marxists and fascists, the fear that their lives were being controlled by a few cigar-smoking figures in panelled dining-rooms, manipulating the world for their own concealed and sinister ends. What could be seen, and what was freely admitted by the industrial magnates themselves, was that they were indeed the ones with power. When, for example, the second Labour government of 1929 tried to repeal the Eight Hours Act which had been passed after the General Strike, the colliery owners responded by saying they would introduce drastic wage reductions. The Miners Federation would not have had any power to resist, and nor could the politicians help them.8
If Stanley Baldwin and his Conservative government failed to see the Wall Street Crash coming in 1929, they had their ignorance in common with almost everyone else in the Western world. They were in any case thrown out of office before the crash happened. The electorate was shocked by Baldwin’s claim that the unemployment problem was ‘greatly exaggerated’. There were 1.1 million people unemployed when he called the election in May 1929. The previous year, Baldwin had brought in the Flappers’ Bill, as it was nicknamed, to give women the same voting rights as men, that is the vote at twenty-one rather than thirty. One Conservative member suggested that once all women had the right to vote there would be no Conservatives returned to Parliament at all. The socialists would promise the working girl heaven on earth, and get all their votes. This was not necessarily the case. Mrs Pankhurst, the great suffrage leader, joined the Conservative party in 1926 and was adopted as a prospective candidate for Whitechapel and St George’s in the East, one of the most deprived areas of London’s East End. She was never elected to Parliament. She lived just long enough to see her lifetime’s dreams for her fellow women come true. She died in June 1928 just a few weeks after 21-year-old women got the vote.
The Labour party won its second election victory outright. Ramsay MacDonald no longer depended upon the support of the Liberals when he took office in June 1929. They immediately brought in Unemployment Insurance Acts, and gave £25 million towards building up dole funds, and a further £25 million to schemes of public works. J. H. Thomas, as Lord Privy Seal, was given special responsibility to work on the problem of unemployment with the assistance of the leftist first commissioner of works, George Lansbury, and the non-cabinet member, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Sir Oswald Mosley, Bt, who had left the Conservatives in protest against the Black and Tans’ thuggery in Ireland and was now a rising ‘hopeful’ of the Labour party. It was announced that the school leaving age would be raised to fifteen from 1931 onwards and the King’s Speech, on 25 June, spoke of his government’s intention to ‘deal effectively’ with unemployment.9
The all but incredible fact is that the second Labour government had come into power without any coherent policy on the central economic question of the day: that is, whether they supported a controlled economy – as for example Sidney Webb did, who as the newly ennobled Lord Passfield sat in the cabinet as Dominions and Colonial Secretary, or whether like the Chancellor of the Exchequer they ‘believed fanatically in the Gold Standard’.10 The most outstanding economic intelligence of the age was a man who was a member of neither the Conservative nor the Labour party, and who had left the employment of the government in 1919 in protest against the Versailles treaty.
Immensely tall, mustachioed, lofty in all senses, Cambridgey, John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) is a name which still divides all who speak or think about twentieth-century British history. His heyday came decades after his death, when in the 1960s and 1970s the governments of the Western world appeared with disastrous results to put his most famous ideas into practice: namely that governments can borrow their way out of recessions, and that inflation, within limits, is good for economies, These are both distortions of what Keynes ever actually wrote or advised in his lifetime. But just as Marx was no Marxist, Keynes, who died in 1946, was no 1960s Keynesian.
As economic adviser to Lloyd George’s government he had attended the Peace Conference and left in order to publish the damning indictment entitled The Economic Consequences of the Peace. His view was that the politicians had concentrated so myopically on political solutions that they had failed to see that the only way to build a lasting peace in Europe was by getting the economy right. The old days of laissez-faire were over, and some form of controlled economy was to be necessary to weather the vicissitudes ahead. The French would always see his book as a piece of troublemaking, if not a cause of the Second World War itself. By making the thinking classes in England believe that German war reparations were both unjust and economically unviable, he had weakened the case for resistance to German rearmament. That was the view, still aired from time to time, most vociferously expressed by Etienne Mantoux in The Carthaginian Peace or the Economic Consequences of Mr Keynes, published after Keynes’s death. Keynes’s book alerted the world to the fact that inter-Ally war debts and German reparations were a recipe not merely for economic but for political disaster. We can now see these factors to be the ‘giant step in the descent’ to totalitarianism and world war.11
It was Keynes who was the first economist to break the news to a world very unwilling to hear it, that unemployment was unavoidable in the current economic situation. It was bound to come, but there were solutions, or at least ways in which it could be drastically reduced. These were based on control of the interest rates, and a flexible currency not tied to the gold standard. The only party which had taken up his ideas with any enthusiasm in the 1929 General Election had been the Liberal party, and one could perhaps say that two of the greatest tragedies of British political life in this period were first that Lloyd George was the Prime Minister who negotiated the peace in 1919, and second that he was not the prime minister who oversaw the economic crises of the early 1930s. He was the only political leader with the stature and national following to have been followed, and the only one who had absorbed Keynes’s new teachings. For whatever the rights and wrongs of the neo-Keynesians of the post-1960s era, Keynes in the 1930s was a figure of titanic importance.
Keynes’s 1920s were a strange decade. A homosexual, he surprised all his friends by falling in love and making a very happy marriage to Lydia Lopokova, a Russian ballet dancer. His cleverer friends mocked her. ‘What a beautiful tree!’ she gaily remarked to Wittgenstein. When he glared at her and replied: ‘What do you mean?’ she burst into tears.12 ‘She hums in his wake, the great man�
�s wife,’ Virginia Woolf somewhat wistfully observed. Keynes adored her and loved her strange English usage. After a wedding, she once spoke of Jesus ‘fomenting wine out of water at Cannes’. ‘I had tea with Lady Grey,’ she said on another occasion. ‘She has an ovary which she likes to show everyone.’13
His life with Lydia was divided between Cambridge, where he enjoyed college business and college dinners at King’s, and gave lectures on economics, and London and Charleston on the Sussex Downs, where he mixed with poets, painters and the clever and the clever-clever. The worst possible news which could come to this ballet-loving couple in the summer of 1929 was surely the death of Diaghilev – in Venice, in August. Lydia, that summer, was taking part in a filmed ballet, the first ballet ever to be inserted into a ‘talkie’ movie. Dark Red Roses was choreographed by George Balanchine with a score from Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina. The filming happened at Wembley, and when the news came of Diaghilev’s death, the dancers ‘crouched on a floor in a little group’, as Keynes described it, ‘talking memories of him hour after hour. It was an extraordinary scene.’
After this sad event, the summer vacation continued. The Cambridge term began as usual. Neither Keynes nor any other economic pundit in the Western world knew what was going to happen. Then, in October, he wrote from Cambridge to Lydia in London: ‘Wall Street did have a go yesterday. Did you read about it? The biggest crash ever recorded.’ Overnight, the certainty which underpinned millions of human lives in Europe and America was suddenly removed. The rich became poor. The poor became unemployable. The human race which had been lulled into feeling that everything since the war had been calming down, getting better, becoming more prosperous, had the experience of placing its foot on what it thought was solid earth and finding itself hurtling through the bottomless air.
* The 1862 Companies Act in England laid the foundations of modern shareholder capitalism. In May 1863 the French passed laws to allow business people to establish joint stock companies with full limited liability provided the capital did not exceed 20 million francs. When Germany was created in 1871, it was not long before it too became a country which encouraged the growth of companies, though German law, unlike America’s Antitrust Act, was much more tolerant than other economies of monopolies.
21
Puzzles and Pastoral
On 16 January 1930, a letter appeared in The Times from Lieutenant-Commander A. C. Powell, Royal Navy:
Sir, I am interested to see that you are including a cross-word [sic] puzzle in your Weekly Edition.
Would it not be an additional attraction to your many readers – of whom I am pleased to be one – if the same cross-word puzzle were reproduced on one day of the week in your daily edition?1
The same page of the newspaper reported a service which had been organized the previous day at St Martin-in-the-Fields for the Howard League for Penal Reform, at which the Archbishop of York, Dr William Temple, had said in his sermon that ‘it seemed to him quite plain that it would be for the benefit of society if the death penalty were abolished’.
The archbishop’s suggestion fell on deaf ears among the governing classes, but the lieutenant-commander’s idea took off. There were, inevitably, some voices of dissent. ‘Let me entreat you to keep The Times from puzzles of all sorts. Space there is precious and prestige also,’1 wrote M. Miller of 69 Warwick Square, SW1. M. Miller was either so pressed for space, or so jealous of prestige, or perhaps both, as not to be able to explain what she (or he) meant. The day that she (or he) wrote, The Times carried the news that Mr Patel had resigned as the president of the legislative assembly in India because the British had ratted on their assurance that India would be granted Dominion status – that is, treated like white countries in the Empire such as Australia and Canada and New Zealand. Sir Arthur Ponsonby became Baron Ponsonby of Shulbree, and Canon Spencer Carpenter became Master of the Temple.
Nearly all the subsequent correspondents, however, as a naval arms conference got under way between five great powers – Britain, France, Italy, Japan and America – clamoured for a cross-word.
The Times was the broadsheet newspaper with the largest circulation, and it had an importance in British public life which is difficult in these days to appreciate. It was the in-house journal of the Establishment, a term first used in 1923. Whereas Northcliffe had used it, in his days as proprietor, to scare and criticize the government, under the new proprietor, Major J. J. Astor,2 who reappointed Geoffrey Dawson as editor,3 it was a small-c conservative paper, intensely cautious in foreign policy, and stuffy in its attitude to change.
Over the matter of the crossword, Dawson commissioned his assistant R. M. Barrington-Ward, later to be editor of the paper (1941–48), to find a suitable crossword-setter. Barrington-Ward asked his friend Robert Bell, of the Observer, and Bell asked his son Adrian, then a thirty-year-old writer who had gone to live in the country to do a little farming and finish a novel. Adrian Bell had neither compiled nor completed a crossword puzzle in his life. He was offered three guineas per puzzle, and agreed to set two puzzles per week. (At this time, the small ads of the paper offered housemaids £40 per annum for full-time employment.) He was to be the paper’s crossword editor and chief setter for the next forty years. He set puzzle number one, and he set puzzle number 10,000. ‘I think you must be near dotty to spend your life setting crosswords,’ he engagingly said in August 1970.4 Bell made only a few mistakes, one of which was to misspell the surname Rossetti in one of his puzzles.
Before long the crossword lost its hyphen and became a regular feature of The Times. Like so many unmistakably British institutions, the crossword began in the United States. Evolving from other acrostic puzzles, the crossword proper first appeared in the Christmas edition of the New York World in 1913, set and edited by Arthur Wynne. By the 1920s crossword mania gripped America. Late in 1924 a man did a survey of all the passengers travelling between New York and Boston by train and found no fewer than 60 per cent engrossed in the puzzle. The New York World puzzle was one of the most popular, set by Gelett Burgess, author of
I never saw a Purple Cow
I never hope to see one;
But I can tell you, anyhow,
I’d rather see than be one.
Of his fans, addicts, victims, or whatever noun would be appropriate, he wrote:
The fans they chew their pencils,
The fans they beat their wives.
They look up words for extinct birds
They lead such puzzling lives.5
At this date, The Times in London had mocked the Americans for their crossword enthusiasm. AN ENSLAVED AMERICA was their headline6 to describe the ‘menace’ which was ‘making devastating inroads on the working hours of every rank of society’.7 Once the mania had crossed the Atlantic, of course, it became as English as, well, as female members of Parliament, as Winston Churchill and Agatha Christie,* as scrambled eggs and the briefcase and the ballot box, all of which had American origins or antecedents.
It was not long, however, after adopting the American pastime of doing crosswords, before readers of The Times were displaying a number of very genuinely British sophistications. It became the pastime of the Establishment classes. ‘Do you think you could find me a copy in which the crossword puzzle has not been solved?’ asked a weary bishop at the Lambeth Conference.8
To establish its élitist status, The Times included a Latin crossword on 1 March. It was not a cryptic crossword, it simply expected readers to be well-versed in those Latin authors read in public schools and at Oxford and Cambridge – especially Horace. Nearly all the poems cited are by Horace, and most of them the Odes. ‘Horace calls Tarentum this’ (ans. Lacedaemonium). ‘Care rides behind me’ was the only clue for equitem, a reference to the third book of Odes, Ode 1, line 40. ‘One of the most remarkable results of this experiment in the crossword puzzle’, crowed the editorial, ‘is the overwhelming evidence it has brought us that the best brains in the country – Ministers of the Crown, Provosts of Colle
ges, King’s Counsel and the rest – all engaged in the most arduous labour – find these little games the very thing to fill up odd moments’.9 But they found them more than that. They found the little games the very thing about which to be aggressively competitive with one another. While Britain lagged behind in its serious attempts to solve the unemployment crisis, or to revive British industry, and while party politics went completely into quiescence, the ‘best brains in the country’ vied with one another to demonstrate trivial nimbleness of intellect combined with effortlessly worn classical erudition.
In the middle of the summer holidays, Sir Josiah Stamp wrote from St Jean-de-Luz the rather touching boast that he was able to complete the puzzle in just under an hour. Stamp (1880–1941) had been a civil servant with particular interest in tax. After the First World War, he had left the Civil Service and joined ICI, as well as becoming a director of the London Midland and Scottish Railway. As the son-in-law of the American General Dawes – he of the committee formed to make sense of the German reparations situation in 1925 – he was quietly pro-German and pro-American. A genial man, loaded with honorary degrees and honorific titles – he became Baron Stamp in 1938 – he wrote in that pompous tone which was no doubt his natural idiom, but which seemed to be adopted by all but the best letter-writers to The Times until very recently. The letter-writers, especially when being archly facetious, adopted the orotund locutions of a butler in an Ivy Compton-Burnett novel. ‘After a week’s chequered but salutary acquaintance with the entertaining mind of your crossword puzzler, I correctly completed his effort of Wednesday last with – or in spite of – spasmodic and guerilla assistance, in 50 minutes,’ wrote Sir Josiah.10