After the Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  For the young Sir Oswald Mosley, it was intolerable that his party, the Labour party, should not be adopting a policy after the Wall Street Crash which got to grips with the soaring unemployment figures. Mosley had visited America in 1926 and gone for a fishing trip with Roosevelt off the coast of Florida. He wrote in his autobiography that he owed his economic ideas partly to reading Keynes and partly to the Federal Reserve Board, whose officials he had met in New York. Although they were speaking, in those days, to deaf ears when they tried to influence presidential policy they came into their own when Roosevelt became president.

  Mosley, then, wanted a much more radical approach to the economic and political crisis. Above all, he wanted to use the Keynesian expedient of borrowing money to promote expansion – a notion which was anathema to Snowden, and incomprehensible to J. H. Thomas, Mosley’s supposed colleague in dealing with the unemployment problem. His ideas were dismissed by Snowden as ‘wild-cat finance’, but they broadly coincided with those of Keynes and Lloyd George.4

  In May 1930, Mosley impulsively resigned from the government, and from the Labour party. It was a dramatic, if small, event. Those who looked back on his career within the party saw Mosley as a future leader, in all likelihood the successor to MacDonald. ‘Every prophet fixed on Sir Oswald as the next party leader,’ said John Scanlon in The Rise and Fall of the Labour Party. Emanuel Shinwell, former Communist, who lived to be over 100 and to become the darling of the Labour party, said: ‘Almost everyone expected that because of his popularity, he would replace Ramsay MacDonald.’5 R. H. Crossman, a minister in Harold Wilson’s Labour government of 1964–6 and subsequently editor of the New Statesman, said Mosley was ‘the outstanding politician of his generation … spurned by Whitehall, Fleet Street and every party at Westminster simply and solely because he was right.’6 Beatrice Webb, now Lady Passfield, saw Mosley as MacDonald’s successor. ‘MacDonald owes his pre-eminence largely to the fact that he is the only artist, the only aristocrat by temperament and talent, in a party of plebeians and plain men. Hitherto, he has had no competitor in personal charm and good looks, delightful voice and the gift of oratory. But Mosley has all these, with the élan of youth, wealth and social position added to them.’7 But in May, incensed that he had not been listened to, Mosley walked. It was obvious to anyone with any political intelligence that he was walking into oblivion, doomed to become, in the words of his loyal second wife, a footnote in history. Beatrice Webb made some very astute observations in her diary:

  An amazing act of arrogance, Oswald Mosley’s melodramatic defection from the Labour Party, slamming the door with a bang to resound throughout the political world. His one remaining chance is to become the He-man of the newspaper lords in their campaign against Baldwin’s leadership of the Conservative Party.8

  Mosley and a few friends – notably John Strachey, a Labour MP, and Harold Nicolson, an ex-diplomat and writer married to the novelist and poet Vita Sackville-West, joined together and started what was called the New Party. Nicolson was at this stage – with very great self-pity since he felt it to be beneath his dignity – working for the Londoner’s Diary gossip column on Beaverbrook’s Evening Standard. There was tremendous enthusiasm for the New Party – but only among the enthusiasts. The Sitwells asked Mosley to Renishaw, where 40,000 inhabitants of Sheffield came to hear him speak.9

  It was quite clear to those with any political nous what Mosley was up to, and in what direction he was going. Even before he had left the Labour party, a foreign journalist at the Labour party conference nicknamed him the English Hitler. Beatrice Webb thought: ‘the British electorate would not stand a Hitler. Mosley has bad health, a slight intelligence and an unstable character. He also lacks genuine fanaticism. Deep down in his heart he is a cynic. He will be beaten and retire.’10 As an analysis of his character that is a bullseye, and as a prediction of what would happen to him politically it is all but true. When Virginia and Leonard Woolf came to stay with the Webbs, they were quizzed by Beatrice about their friend Harold Nicolson, and asked for gossip about the rising New Party. Mosley was already speaking of sweeping the constituencies, and becoming Prime Minister. Beatrice, who has been rightly blamed for her myopic reverence for the Soviet Union, nevertheless understood the British political system inside out. She thought it was ‘passing strange that so clever a man [as Mosley] should be so completely ignorant of British political democracy, of its loyalty and solid judgment, of its incurable dullness and slowness of apprehension of any new thought’.11

  People started to leave the New Party almost as soon as it was formed. Professor C. E. M. Joad, for example, had a conversation with Nicolson on 24 July 1931. Nicolson said: ‘I have joined the Party since I felt it was the only party which gave to intelligence a position above possessions or the thoughts of Karl Marx. He says he left the Party because he felt it was about to subordinate intelligence to muscular bands of young men.’12 Nicolson was slow to realize what this meant. One of his New Party candidates in the 1931 election was Kid Lewis, a welterweight boxing champion. (When asked why he had pulled his punches during one fight he had replied he was afraid of killing someone.) Lewis, a Jew, stood as a New Party candidate for the constituency of Whitechapel, where he came from. He lost his deposit. When the New Party achieved electoral disaster, and when Communist thugs tried to break up Mosley’s meetings with razorblades, Mosley thought – again, Nicolson’s diary tells us – that ‘this forces us to be fascist and that we need no longer hesitate to create our trained and disciplined force. We discuss their uniforms. I suggest grey flannel trousers and shirts.’13 This charming suggestion was not followed. Before long, Mosley had set up the British Union of Fascists, with its sinister, but also ludicrous, black shirts.

  By then, Britain had passed through an economic and political storm which amounted to a mini-revolution. It was caused by the very same problem which had led to Mosley’s ‘amazing act of arrogance’, the economic crisis of 1929–31.

  For the next fourteen years in England, party politics were, as far as government was concerned, in suspension. MacDonald formed two national governments in 1931. In June 1935 he was succeeded by Stanley Baldwin, who himself gave way to Neville Chamberlain in May 1937. They were governments by coalition, governments by bores, and governments by men who were barely equipped to deal with the two great political issues of the time: poverty at home, and the rise of fascism abroad. In the face of both these threats, the successive British governments of the 1930s seemed to be governed by the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury’s maxim: Leave 111 Alone.

  Out of the Stock Market Crash of 1929 came the Depression. Out of that slump came the political leaders who would become the chief players in the century’s drama. But not in Britain. Britain was affected by the Crash, but its political leadership was as nondescript before as after. In America, by contrast, there emerged the titanic figure of Franklin Delano Roosevelt – who was inaugurated as President in the same year, 1933, that Adolf Hitler became the Chancellor of Germany. Though utterly different, they both came forward as saviour-figures, while the Hollow Men of Britain drifted ineffectually. Or so it certainly seemed. Roosevelt made vigorous and semi-successful attempts to deal with the scourge of unemployment. Hitler appeared, within only two years in power, to have pulled off the miracle of curing it altogether. Britain retained its means test, its tough trade union law, its class system, more or less callously, more or less intact.

  The very ingredients which made the great capitalists so prodigiously rich in the good times were those which caused the Crash and the subsequent Depression. The bigger the conglomerates, the greater the amounts of capital they were able, in times of prosperity, to raise on the stock markets. As shares boomed in the 1920s, the harder it was for anyone with spare cash to resist the urge to become a speculator. In fact, in 1929, at most 7 or 8 per cent of the American population actually owned stocks,14 but many who did not own share certificates were indirectly affected by the stock market, in their insurance, mort
gages and savings plans. The huge growth of gadgetry and domestic appliances, and modern ‘convenience’ ways – such as chain stores – had led to an explosion of companies after the war, with businesses making automobiles, radio sets, electric toasters, electric irons, telephones. Many of the little firms depended on larger ones for their business. Successful companies were always going to be gobbled up by the larger sharks in the ocean, but in the energy of the expanding market many very dubious concerns were in operation, and sound money was not what the investors were after. As the speculative craze took hold, they wanted, and seemed to be offered, a quick buck. As he left office in 1928 President Coolidge told the electorate that their prosperity was ‘absolutely sound’ and that stocks were ‘cheap at current prices’.15

  His successor was Herbert Hoover, born in the tiny Midwestern town of West Branch, Iowa, a devout Quaker, who had become a mining engineer in his twenties and amassed a fortune. His was an archetypical, virtuous American success story and he probably spoke with complete sincerity when, in his inaugural address in 1929, he said: ‘We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land. The poorhouse is vanishing from among us. We have not reached the goal, but, given a chance to go forward with the policies of the last eight years, we shall soon with the help of God be in sight of the day when poverty shall be banished from this nation.’16

  Throughout the summer there were warning signals for anyone with the wit to notice them. Production was easing in all the major industries, unemployment was slowly but appreciably going up. Brokers’ loans were rising steadily, from about $43.5 million in June 1927 to $48 million in September 1929. But the investors did not read the signs, and the New York Stock Exchange continued to rise.

  It was in October that the crash came, and a wild scramble began to unload stocks which were tumbling in value. On 29 October the New York Times index of industrials fell 49 points, followed next trading day by another 43 points. The fall from high to low is awesome to consider. By 1 March 1933, the value of stocks on the New York Exchange was less than one-fifth of the market’s peak. The New York Times stock average, which stood at 452 on 3 September 1929, bottomed at 52 in July 1932.17

  The cost in human terms was terrible. Industrial production in the United States fell by 50 per cent, and by 1933 one-third or one-quarter of the labour force – no one could calculate exactly – were out of work. The Ford Motor Company, which in spring 1929 employed 128,000 workers, was down to 37,000 by August 1931. This was the era of the soup kitchens, semi-starvation in the cities, the mass exodus, described in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, of dispossessed migrants into California. Almost overnight, the richest country in the capitalist West had become what we would today call a Third World country, dominated by the basic need to eat and the fear of starvation itself. Twenty thousand took part in the Bonus March of 1932 – some from as far away as California. This was when war veterans, holding government bonus certificates which were due years in the future, marched on Washington demanding that Congress pay them off now. They came in battered old cars, on freight trains, or by hitch-hiking. Chief Running Wolf, a jobless Mescalero India from New Mexico, came in full Indian dress with a bow and arrow. The 20,000 were mostly encamped, when they reached Washington, on Anacostia Flats, on the far side of the Potomac River from the Capitol. President Hoover, the Quaker, ordered the army to evict them. He walled himself up in the White House guarded by four troops of cavalry, four companies of infantry, a machine-gun squadron and six tanks, commanded by General Douglas MacArthur and aided by Major Dwight Eisenhower.18

  The words of the song by ‘Yip’ Harburg for the 1932 show Americana had terrible resonance.

  Once in khaki suits,

  Gee, we looked swell,

  Full of that Yankee Doodle-de-dum.

  Half a million boots went sloggin’ through Hell,

  I was the kid with the drum.

  Say, don’t you remember, they called me Al –

  I was Al all the time.

  Say, don’t you remember I’m your pal –

  Brother, can you spare a dime.

  It was inevitable that when the election came in 1932, the Republicans would finally be sent packing, and Franklin D. Roosevelt should come in.

  The New Deal enjoyed a measure of success, in the short term, in making lives better for the unemployed. In the long term, it helped lift poorer Americans into the possibility of education, self-betterment, and economic opportunity, by a whole range of measures. Opinions will always differ about whether it ‘worked’ economically. The most striking feature of the times, after the 1929 debacle, was that all the major countries of the world except Britain appeared to be moving in the direction of powerfully controlled economies. Roosevelt rushed the National Recovery Act, handing over to himself and a small committee of big businessmen, trade associations and a few fledgling trade union leaders the power to take control of the economy.

  The plight of the unemployed in Britain was brought to public attention by hunger marches. Groups of men from depressed areas would march through the country on the capital as visible demonstrations that capitalism had failed. The Communist Wal Hannington was a pioneer of the idea of the marches. They were enthusiastically adopted by Ellen Wilkinson, who for four years was a member of the Communist party, but who was elected as MP for Jarrow in 1935. This tiny woman from Greater Manchester, who possessed her Irish mother’s vivid colouring and high temper, was one of the livelier members of a dull, almost criminally dull, Parliament. It was she who organized the most famous of the hunger marches, that from her own constituency, in 1936. Charles Palmer’s great shipyard closed in 1933. This great shipbuilding port in County Durham, which had supplied the Empire with so many of its trading vessels, was dead: it had become, in the title of Wilkinson’s most famous book, The Town That Was Murdered.

  Ellen Wilkinson would not have supported rearmament. Otherwise she might have been urging the government to put public money into reopening the shipyards of the North-East. Admiral of the Fleet Sir Frederick Field was warning as early as 1931 that naval power was dangerously depleted: ‘The number of our capital ships is now so reduced that should the protection of our interests render it necessary to move our fleet to the East, insufficient vessels of this type would be left in Home Waters to ensure the security of our trade and territory in the event of any dispute arising with a world power.’19

  In 1918 the Royal Navy had 433 destroyers. By 1936 there would be only 65 which were not over-age. There were no adequately defended ports in the entire British Empire, as the Japanese discovered in Singapore in February 1942.20

  Successive governments – MacDonald, Baldwin, Chamberlain – were prepared to do little. Public opinion was against the war. They got away with it because towns such as Jarrow (where 68 per cent of the workforce were employed in just one industry, shipbuilding) were unusual. For most working-class people in Britain, unemployment was sporadic, and for the middle classes it was all but unknown. After 1932, unemployment levels began to fall.21 Life was hard, but actual destitution, such as was suffered in Germany or America, was rare.

  It was a century of disguises, and masks. If the war in the desert in 1917 was haunted by a middle-class Englishman disguised as an Arab, the dosshouses and dole-queues of the 1930s were to be most vividly chronicled by a tall Old Etonian with an upper-class drawly voice, who somehow believed that rolling his own cigarettes and wearing corduroy made him into an honorary proletarian. In his direct reportage, however, of what life was actually like for working-class people in the depressed industrial districts of Northern England, George Orwell has no rival. Who, having read The Road to Wigan Pier, first published in 1937, can ever forget his description of a coal miner’s working day, in which he points out that in order to start a seven-and-a-half-hour shift, the miner has to make a subterranean journey of at least an hour, sometimes several hours, through dark, low, dripping passages? Or his observation that howe
ver squalid the housing, there is such a housing shortage that people are desperate to live in the jerry-built back-to-back terraces. Or the common sense of his observation that it was the small landlords who were the worst. ‘Ideally, the worst type of slum landlord is a fat wicked man, preferably a bishop, who is drawing an immense income from extortionate rents. Actually, it is a poor old woman who has invested her life’s savings in three slum houses, inhabits one of them and tries to live on the rent of the other two – never, in consequence, having any money for repairs.’22

  All the observation has the ring of truth. So, too, does his vivid treatment of statistics. ‘When you see the unemployment figures quoted at two millions, it is fatally easy to take this as meaning that two million people are out of work and the rest of the population is comparatively comfortable.’ He reminds us that an unemployed man’s dependants never appear on the list, and when you remember this, the figure of two million must immediately be multiplied to six. Then take in those who are not unemployed but are living on money which is less than a living wage, and you quickly come to a figure like 10 million people. Another calculation, quoted by Orwell, puts it as more like 20 million people living in the degraded and anxious conditions he describes in his first fifty masterly pages.

  In the second half of the book there is a change of gear and Orwell the camera turns into Orwell the ranter. The fact that it is rant delivered in a quiet, grammatical parody of a sensible voice does not stop it being rant. Much of the rant is highly enjoyable. His hatred of literary London is congenial. ‘In the highbrow world you “get on”, if you “get on” at all, not so much by your literary ability as by being the life and soul of cocktail parties and kissing the bums of verminous little lions.’ Even if it isn’t true, it is satisfying to read. And his attacks on Roman Catholics are always funny. He has found some absurd passage of G. K. Chesterton where it is stated that true Catholics drink beer, and tea-drinking is pagan. The riposte is Orwell at his simple best: ‘Tell an Irish dock-labourer in the slums of Liverpool that his cup of tea is “pagan”, and he will call you a fool.’23