by Philipp Blom
Strikebreakers in Rhondda, Wales.
Coal-mining towns were hit particularly badly. In Wales and in the north of England, the mines and the businesses that supplied them were practically the only local employers, and together they had sustained a proud and very distinctive working-class culture. Coal exports, which had amounted to 287 million tons in 1913, had plummeted to 40 million, a decline of 86 percent. Whole towns fell eerily silent, their skies no longer filled with black smoke; houses and faces were washed clean of the black grime that had covered everything—uncommonly clean, but destitute. Hundreds of thousands of miners were forced to work only three or four days a week, and the meager pay that previously had only just sufficed to keep body and soul together had dropped below subsistence level. In many areas of Britain, dockyards, mines, and factories were quiet, the equipment rusting away in a graveyard-like silence.
A Journey Through Decline
NO WONDER, THEN, that those who could afford it sought distraction. But another book published in 1934 showed this desperate Britain, so very different from Wodehouse’s charming diversions. Throughout the previous year, the journalist and essayist J. B. Priestley had traveled through the country by bus, recording his impressions in his soon-to-be-famous English Journey. His explorations extended from the prosperous south to the stricken north, painting a vivid picture of the huge disparities between those areas that were comfortably well off and those others that might as well have been in a different country.
Priestley’s very first encounter, on the bus from London, went to the heart of the predicament that was to accompany him throughout his journey: the effects of the 1929 Wall Street crash. One of his fellow travelers was “a thinnish fellow, somewhere in his forties, and he had a sharp nose, a neat moustache, rimless eyeglasses, and one of those enormous foreheads, roomy enough for an Einstein, that so often do not seem to mean anything.” This man had recently started his own business, and it had failed:
“Tea rooms.” And he pointed at one that we were passing. “I tried it once. The wife was keen. In Kent. Good position too, on a main road. We’d everything very nice, very nice indeed. We called it the Chaucer Pilgrims—you know, Chaucer. Old style—Tudor, you know—black beams and everything. Couldn’t make it pay. I wouldn’t have bothered, but the wife was keen. If you ask me what let us down, I’d say it was the slump in America. It was on the road to Canterbury, you see—Chaucer Pilgrims—but we weren’t getting the American tourists. I wouldn’t touch a tea room again, not if you gave it to me.”1
Despite this particular unhappy venture, the south of England was still green and pleasant, the author noted. In Southampton he found the pavement “crowded with neat smiling people, mostly women, and the mile of shops seemed to be doing a brisk trade. . . . At first I felt like a man who had walked into a fairy-tale of commerce. The people who jostled me . . . all seemed well-fed, decently clothed, cheerful, almost gay. The sun beamed upon them, and so did I.”2 From here he moved to Bath, “like a beautiful dowager giving a reception,” and Bristol, “a fine city. They are right to be proud of it.”
Winding his way up through the Cotswolds and its picturesque villages with their manor houses and layered historic richness, he was able to call England a prosperous place, even for those on the lower rungs of the social ladder: “The men of the land are not well paid, but they can live on their wages. People looked comfortable here. The children were in noticeably good shape.”3 He visited factories on the way and jotted down impressions and conversations; he saw cars and buses and typewriters being built and chocolate marshmallows being made in a proud land of manufacturing and commerce.
From Birmingham, Priestley’s tour went to the Black Country and the “metallic Midlands,” and here things began to change. “I descended into the vast smoky hollow and watched it turn itself into so many workshops, grimy rows of houses, pubs and picture theatres, yards filled with rusted metal, and great patches of waste ground.”4
In the industrial towns of the Midlands, Priestley began to notice more evidence of poverty, an almost Dickensian world. He went to a desultory fairground to see someone billed as the world’s ugliest woman, and in Liverpool he visited “the queerest parish in England,” run by a priest who had made it his mission in life to look after the children of prostitutes working in the harbor, many of whom had come from Britain’s colonies, or, if they were English, had already plied their trade abroad. The children had mostly been abandoned by their mothers. “Faces that had shone for a season in brothels in Victoria’s time now peered and mumbled at us. Port Said and Bombay, Zanzibar and Hong Kong had called here. The babies told the tale plainly enough. They were of all shades, and Asia and Africa came peeping out of their eyes.”5
Arriving in Blackpool outside the vacation season, the traveler saw a ghost town: “Its bravery was very tawdry, after being neglected only a week or two in that Atlantic weather. They had all gone, the fiddlers, fortune-tellers, pierrots, cheap-jacks, waiters and sellers of peppermint and pineapple rock. Somebody was demonstrating with voice, piano and saxophone the ‘Season’s Hot Successes.’”6
In Blackburn, a different, darker reality announced itself. The once booming cotton trade had all but come to a complete standstill. “You can have a mill rent-free up there, if you are prepared to work it,” he noted. “Nobody has any money to buy, rent or run mills anymore. The entire district has been sliding towards a complete bankruptcy for years.”
The tales of men driven out of business were innumerable. “I heard of one former cotton king who was seen picking up cigarette ends in the street. Another was a bus conductor, another had a stall in the open market, another is a barman,” Priestley wrote. One woman complained about the transformation of the landscape: “It’s awful. . . . They’ve got no work at all. And I hardly recognized the place. It’s all becoming clean. The smuts are wearing off because so few of the mills are working. The brick and stone are beginning to show through.”7
This was a brutal Britain of industrial ruins and slums, of derelict factories and hungry children. A boxing match in Newcastle provided entertainment for men on the dole, as well as a desperately needed opportunity to earn a few shillings for those brave enough to enter the ring: “There was a lot of blood about, partly because most of the boxers were novices who hit out wildly and also bled easily. . . . The crowd did not seem to mind this: they were a bloodthirsty lot. . . . ‘Oo, yer b——!’ they cried in delight when one of the stained gloves got home with a nasty thud. . . . It was uncompromisingly ugly.”8
When Priestley reached the town of Jarrow in the county of Durham, where 80 percent of the working population were unemployed, he acknowledged that he was staring into the social abyss: “There is no escape anywhere in Jarrow from its prevailing misery, for it is entirely a working-class town. One little street may be rather more wretched than another, but to the outsider they all look alike. One out of every two shops appeared to be permanently closed. Wherever we went there were men hanging about, not scores of them but hundreds and thousands of them. The whole town looked as if it had entered a perpetual penniless bleak Sabbath. The men wore the drawn masks of prisoners of war.”9
The hulls of ships were “rusting away in rows,” as investors had abandoned the shipyards or gone bankrupt. The mines in the surrounding villages were offering little work, and what there was paid less than a living wage; the men were so desperate that even the most rudimentary safety regulations were regularly ignored. “During the five years ending with 1931 more than 5,000 people were killed in the coal-mining industry, and more than 80,000 were injured,” he wrote. “It was estimated that in 1932 nearly one in every five persons employed underground was injured. The women in a mining village live forever in the anxious atmosphere of the war years.”10
Life on the dole was hard and unforgiving, and it did not just affect the vulnerable industries in the north. Max Cohen, an unemployed cabinetmaker, knew all about “the dull finality of having no money at all.” Out of a
job, he soon found that his days began to revolve around finding the next meal.
Life . . . became divided into more or less rigid periods. . . . There was Friday . . . the day, when after feverish waiting at the Labour Exchange, I received the life-giving fourteen shillings. After paying six shillings and sixpence a week rent, I was able, with much care and discrimination, to exist in a more or less normal fashion during the first half of the week. Of course, I could spend nothing on replacing my clothes, or on minor luxuries of any kind, no matter how trifling. From Tuesday on came bankruptcy. . . . I had no money at all, and so, in a sense, nothing more to worry about. . . . I lived on whatever may have been left of those things I had bought at the beginning of the week—on dry bread and bits of tasteless cheese. All that was necessary was to pull my belt tighter, ignore the empty ache in my stomach and hang on till Friday and deliverance came round again.11
With a little luck, a skilled young man could hope to find a job again at some point. But for those locked in real poverty, there seemed no way out. There were still Dickensian slums in the East End of London, a part of the city one civil servant described as being “as unknown to us as the Trobriand Islands.”12 The housing shortage was so severe that in 1931 a third of the population of London had been living with more than three people to a room; only 37 percent of families had the luxury of a house or flat to themselves.
A Dandy Dreams of Dictatorship
FOR THE GOVERNMENT, the thirties were a time of perpetual crisis. With 2.5 million unemployed by 1930 there were real fears of revolution, and the hardship extended right into the government: Ramsay MacDonald, Labour prime minister in the coalition government and the illegitimate son of a maid on a Scottish farm, was obliged to eat in the official dining rooms at 10 Downing Street, since he could not afford the coal to heat his own apartment.
MacDonald tried to contain the emergency and assist those enduring the most hardship. When financiers in the City of London forced him to agree to a painful cut in unemployment benefits—effectively condemning millions of vulnerable people to going hungry—half of his cabinet refused to go along with the measure. The prime minister tendered his resignation, only to be instructed by King George V to remain at his post and “carry the country through.”
MacDonald’s chancellor of the exchequer, Philip Snowden, was a self-described socialist, but a firm believer nonetheless in the self-regulating mechanisms of the free market. He insisted on maintaining an economic policy of strict austerity. But by the end of 1931, both MacDonald and Snowden had admitted defeat: even with Liberal support, the massive difficulty of both repaying debt and supporting the millions unemployed had proved as great as that of fighting and financing the war.
MacDonald chose what he considered the lesser of two evils and invited the Conservatives into a government of national unity. Though this act led to his expulsion (and Snowden’s) from the Labour Party, it was popular with the public: in a general election in November of that year, Labour crashed from 287 parliamentary seats to a mere 54, but MacDonald himself was returned to power with a resounding majority for his coalition. His new chancellor, the Conservative Neville Chamberlain, did manage to balance the budget by early 1934, though at huge cost to the poorest Britons. MacDonald had disagreed with his methods, but he remained dependent on Conservative support for his coalition.
With his own political weakness exacerbated by increasing health problems, MacDonald was not strong enough to overrule the powerful chancellor. Chamberlain had cut unemployment benefits by 20 percent, and others also had had to make major sacrifices. The result was serious social unrest. In 1932 and 1933, tens of thousands of unemployed workers from Scotland and the north of England converged on London for hunger marches. When sailors on the battleship HMS Valiant were informed that their pay was being cut by 25 percent while officers had to accept a cut of only 4 percent, the sailors mutinied.
There were other repercussions, too. MacDonald’s first government had included the brilliant young baronet Sir Oswald Mosley, a committed Fabian and originally a Conservative, then an Independent, then a member of the Independent Labour Party. In early 1930, Mosley had put forward a proposal to rescue the flailing economy and beat back unemployment with a Keynesian plan of public works funded by deficit spending, supplemented by a program of high tariffs and the nationalization of heavy industries. In May 1930, his proposal rejected, he had resigned in protest and formed his own New Party. When they failed to gain any seats in the election of November 1931, Moseley turned abroad for inspiration. On a visit to Rome he made an admiring study of Mussolini’s Fascist government, and returned home determined to set up a similar movement.
The British Union of Fascists was established in 1932 and was soon boasting a membership of fifty thousand. Though this number was almost certainly exaggerated, the group did for a time enjoy the support of the Daily Mirror, a London tabloid with a circulation of some three million, owned by Lord Rothermere, an admirer and personal acquaintance of both Mussolini and Hitler. In January 1934 the paper ran an infamous editorial entitled “Hurrah for the Blackshirts” and lauding Mosley’s “sound, commonsense, Conservative doctrine.”
In 1938, Mosley and his Blackshirts would be satirized by P. G. Wodehouse in a Jeeves and Wooster novel as Roderick Spode and his Black Shorts, the dress code deriving from the fact that by the time Spode formed his movement “there were no shirts left.” But even in the real world, the British Fascists failed to make much of an impact on interwar politics. Mosley himself was regarded as too narcissistic and too self-indulgent to be taken seriously as a political leader. He liked the high life, was a regular on the party circuit, and was seen at all the right clubs, dressed either with the flamboyant elegance his wealth allowed or in the austere black tunic of his party.
Lord chancellor Lord Birkenhead, Winston Churchill’s closest friend, called Mosley a “perfumed popinjay of scented boudoirs.”13 (Birkenhead was famous for his witty rejoinders. A fellow judge is said to have sought his advice on sentencing in a sodomy case, asking, “What do you think one ought to give a man who allows himself to be buggered?” “Oh,” replied Birkenhead, “thirty shillings or two pounds—whatever you happen to have on you.”14)
Mosley’s views received at least qualified sympathy among the British upper class, many of whom, concerned at the increasing social unrest, feared a Bolshevik-style revolution. King George V himself acknowledged the virtues of authoritarian government. The flirtation of his eldest son, David, later—briefly—King Edward VIII, with not only fascism in general but Hitlerism in particular was to prove a running sore in British politics until the end of the Second World War and beyond. But there were warning voices, too. In his 1932 bestseller The Coming Struggle for Power, John Strachey, Mosley’s former private secretary who had turned away from his employer and embraced socialism, warned of what would lie ahead for Britain if it went down a fascist route: “Direct, open terror against the workers, violent aggression against its rivals, can alone enable a modern empire to maintain itself. A name for such a policy has been found: it is fascism.”15
As a popular movement, fascism failed to gain traction in Britain. After a violent incident between protesters and blackshirts at a party rally in 1934, it was entirely marginalized; in 1936, a Public Order Act outlawed military-style organizations and the wearing of political uniforms. But the now widespread sense of anxiety was mixed with a feeling of helplessness and even inevitability. In a later lament, the conservative Roman Catholic writer Evelyn Waugh wrote that the “seemingly-solid, patiently-built, gorgeously-ornamented structure of western life was to melt overnight like an ice-castle, leaving only a puddle of mud.”16 From the perspective of the left, things looked even more threatening. Beatrice Webb, blind to any possible Soviet threat, had noted shortly before the Nazis came to power:
The U.S.A., with its cancerous growth of crime and uncounted but destitute unemployed; Germany hanging over the precipice of a nationalist dictatorship; Italy boasti
ng of its military preparedness; France, in dread of a new combination of Italy, Germany and Austria against her; Spain on the brink of revolution; the Balkan states snarling at each other; the Far East in a state of anarchic ferment; the African continent uncertain whether its paramount interest and cultural power will be black or white; South American states forcibly replacing pseudo-democracies by military dictatorships; and finally—acutely hostile to the rest of the world, engulfed in a fabulous effort, the success of which would shake capitalist civilization to its very foundations—Soviet Russia.17
The climate of uncertainty was reflected in a plethora of publications that appeared during the early 1930s. Like Strachey’s The Coming Struggle for Power, George Douglas Cole’s An Intelligent Man’s Guide Through World Chaos sold strongly (fifty thousand copies); bookshops offered it next to Fenner Brockway’s Hungry England. In 1933, the literary success of the season was Love on the Dole by Walter Greenwood (forty-six thousand copies), a novel set in an industrial slum in Greenwood’s hometown, Salford. The year 1934 saw the publication of a new journal, Plan, which in its first issue speculated that “economic breakdown and international anarchy threaten to destroy civilization.”