Ellen Wilkinson, a good friend of the Coles, was among the casualties of the Labour Party’s landslide defeat in the election. A former Guild Socialist and Communist, the fiery ‘Red Ellen’ was a class warrior who organized the Jarrow Hunger March. After losing her seat at Middlesbrough East, Wilkinson published The Division Bell Mystery. The mystery surrounding a rich financier’s murder stems from a supremely incompetent police investigation of the crime scene, but in the vivid writing, background colour and characterization there is ample compensation for a lack of ‘fair play’. The book’s enduring appeal is underlined by unexpected parallels between the society Wilkinson describes and British life in the twenty-first century. When she returned to Parliament, politics’ gain was detective fiction’s loss.
Capitalism got a bad Press in Golden Age fiction, whatever the political instincts of the author. Contempt for shady financiers and businessmen, at least as fierce in the Thirties as scorn for greedy bankers today, was a recurrent theme, starting with Bentley’s denunciation of the murder victim Sigsbee Manderson in Trent’s Last Case. Members of the board of directors of the ruthless corporation Hardware Limited are eliminated, one by one, in John Rhode’s Death on the Board, while the conservatively inclined Freeman Wills Crofts became a persistent critic of business mores. Crofts, like Rhode, understood industry better than most detective novelists, and his descriptions of how businessmen (they almost always were men) operate are as convincing as any of the period. The 12.30 from Croydon describes how a factory owner facing ruin because of the slump is driven to contemplate murdering his wealthy uncle. All goes well until he has the misfortune to attract the attention of Inspector French.
A dramatic board meeting opens the Coles’ Big Business Murder. Kingsley Manson, the managing director of Arrow Investments, reveals to his colleagues that the business is founded on a swindle, which seems likely to unravel unless they all support his attempts to dodge the problem. An honest director called Gathorne objects, but the others go along with Manson. The scene is set for a first-rate book, but after Gathorne’s predictable murder the story falls apart. The business scam might have enabled the Coles to flay corporate greed, or to chart the unbearable pressures that drive people to crime. Instead, they came up with the feeblest of plots, and Wilson solves the mystery by proving the guilt of the most obvious suspect. A large chunk of the book pursues the ramifications of a false confession. Quixotic confessions to protect a loved one were a familiar feature of Golden Age novels, but this one is among the most tediously protracted. Christie was much cleverer, subverting the trope of the false confession in The Murder at the Vicarage by turning it into a double bluff.
In the hands of an innovative writer, as Bruce Hamilton showed in his occasional novels, Golden Age detective fiction was capable of reflecting a radical agenda, but the Coles were content with satire so gentle that it made Sayers look like Hogarth. The couple’s sheltered existence in academe meant they had no experience of earning a living in business, big or small, and little insight into the corporate world they deplored as a matter of principle.
In stark contrast, Sayers’ years at Benson’s ensured the authenticity of her portrayal of office life in Murder Must Advertise. Wimsey assumes a false identity to take a job at Pym’s Publicity so that he can investigate the death of an employee and the apparent link between the firm and a gang of drug-smugglers. The puzzle is perfunctory, but the depiction of office politics is highly entertaining. Sayers amuses herself by having Wimsey invent a campaign to promote Whiffles cigarettes that is a forerunner of the Air Miles type of scheme; tongue firmly in cheek, she has him describe it as ‘the biggest advertising stunt since the Mustard Club’ – which had been her own invention at Benson’s, of course. The final sentence of the book is ‘Advertise, or go under.’
Money and class are her key themes. ‘You don’t know what it means to be stuck for money,’ the culprit tells Wimsey when making his confession. Wimsey did not – but Sayers did, and her empathy with people strapped for cash gives the novel its bite. Long before it became fashionable to critique the consumer society, she offers a picture of a world in which people are sold a dream of health and happiness, a world where they are gulled into thinking they can Whiffle their way to a fortune: ‘If this hell’s-dance of spending and saving were to stop for a moment, what would happen? … [Wimsey] had never realised the enormous commercial importance of the comparatively poor.’ Sayers writes with a fierce sympathy about ‘those who, aching for a luxury beyond their reach and for a leisure for ever denied them, could be bullied or wheedled into spending their few hardly won shillings on whatever might give them, if only for a moment, a leisured and luxurious illusion.’
Money was not everything. Social status still counted for a great deal. Sayers made her detective an aristocrat, which has prompted accusations of snobbishness. This criticism, like so many made of Golden Age writers, is simplistic and unfair. Similar complaints are never directed at the Coles, who wrote six books about the Honourable Everard Blatchington. Once, when Sayers and Gladys Mitchell discussed the initiation ritual, Sayers said that the member whose participation would most amuse her would be Lord Gorell, but she knew he would be far too dignified for such nonsense. She had no time for pomposity.
Sayers’ snobbery, such as it was, resembled the Coles’, and focused on intellectual, rather than social, elitism. Like the Coles, she appreciated ‘the intelligent man’ – and intelligent women. As for the arch-conservatives Wade and Connington, they were scathing about police officers and others who condescended to subordinates or ordinary working people. There was no shortage of class prejudice during the Golden Age, but it was not a defining feature of the Detection Club. That said, the attempts of members of all political persuasions to render the dialogue of working class people phonetically make a modern reader cringe, if not as much as recurrent examples of casual racism and sexism. But it is striking that, although Agatha Christie strove to separate her writing from her emotional life, one of the rare moments of deeply felt passion in her whodunits comes when Miss Marple is reduced to tears of pity and rage by the cruel murder, not a member of the genteel middle class, but a gullible, ill-educated housemaid.
One writer ferociously hostile to snobbery was Roy Vickers, who after a long writing career was elected to the Detection Club in the Fifties. William Edward Vickers, to give his real name, was educated at Charterhouse and Oxford, but left without taking a degree, and although he qualified as a barrister he soon turned to journalism. Despite his apparent advantages, the smooth progress of his career seems to have been hindered by lack of money and a supportive social network. Vickers’ output includes a novel and a short story with different plots, both called Murder of a Snob. The Judge’s Dilemma, written under the name of Sefton Kyle, has a chapter called ‘Class Prejudices’ in which the near-impossibility of a young barrister succeeding in his chosen career without money behind him is described with what seems like personal anguish. Vickers’ writing simmers with resentment towards the ‘haves’ who patronized the ‘have-nots’. He recognized, as did many others in the Detection Club, that England in the Thirties was not a meritocracy, nor a country at ease with itself.
Anxiety about the state of the economy went hand in hand with dread of another war. On 9 February 1933, a few days after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, a student debate was held by the Oxford Union Society. The Gothic grandeur of the debating chamber was familiar to many members of the Detection Club, including Knox and Bentley, two former Presidents of the Union. The motion was that ‘this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and country’ and the proposer argued: ‘It is no mere coincidence that the only country fighting for the cause of peace, Soviet Russia, is the country that has rid itself of the war-mongering clique.’
Douglas Cole spoke in favour of the motion. When an opponent demanded to know what he would do if a German tried to rape his wife, he replied, ‘I would get in between.’ This answer, according to one wi
tness, ‘brought the house down’. What Margaret thought about Douglas’ jaunty riposte is unknown, since she chose not to mention the debate in either her own memoirs or her biography of him.
The pacifists won the day, with the motion passed by 275 votes to 153. Even in 1933, the Oxford Union was scarcely a microcosm of British society, but the outcome caused a furore. The Daily Express was incensed: ‘There is no question but that the woozy-minded Communists, the practical jokers, and the sexual indeterminates of Oxford have scored a great success.’ Someone sent the Union a box containing 275 white feathers, one for each vote for the motion, but this condemnation of cowardice lacked sting, given that the sender did not have the courage to give his or her name. Pacifism was a popular cause, and plenty of voices were raised in support of the students who voted for the motion.
Among them was A. A. Milne’s. Although he had fought during the war, his health had suffered, and over time his long-held pacifist views hardened. In 1934, he published Peace with Honour, a passionately argued attack on the value and inevitability of war. He misread Hitler and Mussolini, but although his idealism was misplaced, he had personal experience of the horrific nature of fighting in battle, and did not want others to go through what he had endured. In the same year, the canon of St Paul’s Cathedral, Dick Sheppard, invited men (not women) to send him postcards containing the pledge: ‘I renounce war, and I will never support or sanction another.’ This initiative resulted in the formation of the Peace Pledge Union, which soon attracted more than one hundred thousand supporters.
At Westminster, Baldwin struggled with the question of rearmament, which was hugely expensive and deeply unpopular. Churchill, a voice crying in the wilderness, said the government was ‘decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent. So we go on, preparing more months and years – precious, perhaps vital, to the greatness of Britain – for the locusts to eat.’
‘Supposing I had gone to the country and said that Germany was rearming and we must rearm,’ Baldwin retorted. ‘Does anybody think that this pacific democracy would have rallied to that cry at that moment? I cannot think of anything that would have made the loss of the election from my point of view more certain.’ Churchill thought this a ‘squalid confession’, but it was at least frank. When Mussolini invaded Abyssinia, Britain probably could not have stopped him, even had the political will to do so existed.
Trouble overseas was mirrored by despair at home. Berkeley was wracked by self-doubt in many areas of his life, but – like Douglas Cole – supremely confident that he knew what was best for others. He published O England! under his real name, A. B. Cox, and his publishers trumpeted it as ‘an examination of the causes of our present discontents, social and political: a book which affects every citizen personally.’ As a manifesto for sweeping reform, it is typical Berkeley: often disagreeable, sometimes ridiculous, but at times startlingly visionary.
Berkeley was lucky, never having known the financial hardship suffered by Sayers and Anthony Gilbert in their younger days. However, he announced he was writing out of ‘indignation’, a characteristic state where he was concerned. People who knew him must have blinked at his claim, ‘I am a fairly typical ordinary English citizen’. He struck a populist note, lashing out at ‘temperance cranks’ and ‘anti-gambling cranks’, and insisting that ‘England is a land of very special flavour … Her national character is, without any exception at all, the best.’ Yet he was quicker than many to understand the vile nature of Hitler’s Germany: ‘In the last two years, we find one great nation reverting to hooliganism and medieval Jew-baiting.’
Berkeley argued that professional politicians were incapable of making the changes needed, and people must be wary: ‘Fascism and Communism, the twin autocracies, await us … Italy, in a precisely similar dilemma, chose Fascism and Mussolini. Are we to choose Sir Oswald Mosley?’ For Berkeley, a much better option was a European pact. ‘Personally, I have no faith left in the League of Nations. It is too cumbersome, too political and too weak … What I should like to see would be a League of European Nations … It is bound to come one day.’
As ever, his views on women were mired in contradiction. On the one hand, he believed that ‘if the Governments of all countries were in the hands of women, there would be no wars; and that in itself would almost justify the revolution.’ Yet for him, the female mind had ‘too great a preoccupation with human relationships’, and the fact that he saw this as a weakness speaks volumes. He identified areas of unfairness towards women that should be put right: the power of a husband to disinherit a faithful wife; restrictions governing the employment of women; and unequal pay for equal work. His solution was a Women’s Charter and a minimum adult wage for everyone over twenty-one.
Each political party was flayed in turn, but he reserved most of his vitriol for Labour, arguing that if they won the next election, there would be civil war within three years. Yet he highlighted the decency of Ellen Wilkinson, and mused, ‘To a man such as Mr G. D. H. Cole the country might be prepared to trust itself. But these men, not being the shouters and the unscrupulous, or Trade Unionists, are lost.’
Berkeley was infuriated by ‘the wretched little whipper-snappers and jacks-in-office who, inflated like blimps with their own arrogance, treat the public like dirt’. Presumably not feeling in the least arrogant, he made the memorable pronouncement: ‘Undoubtedly the best as well as the most useful period of the human mind is from 35 to 45. (I am 40 myself, and have no doubt at all on the fact.)’
He criticized unfair business competition through use of ‘the huge resources of the chain-store to sell at a deliberate loss, until the one-man shop has been put out of business’. Decades before it became fashionable to condemn multinationals which indulge in elaborate tax avoidance schemes, he insisted that the greater the size of a business, the greater the responsibility to the whole community. His manifesto proposed a temporary National Government excluding professional politicians, and the abolition of all ‘petty restrictions that serve no adequate purpose’. He wanted legislation in plain English, a Ministry of Justice and a Public Defender, statutory protection of all workers from exploitation by employers and from unhealthy conditions of work, improved state education, and the reform of social security law to eliminate individual hardship. But he concluded gloomily by asking if there was any hope that his programme could be put through. The answer he gave himself was ‘no’.
His publisher included a slip at back of book which ‘can be removed without defacing your copy’, noting that ‘little or no help can be expected from the Press for obvious reasons’ and inviting those who agreed with Berkeley to spread the word. But this was long before viral campaigning, and few people became aware of Berkeley’s manifesto for saving the nation. Even fewer could be bothered to promote them. The dust jacket of O England! promised a follow-up volume. The title, You and I and All of Us, suggests a rallying cry along the lines of ‘we’re all in it together’. But the book never appeared.
Berkeley lost heart. The years of frantic, constant writing, coupled with failure to find happiness in his personal life, were taking a toll. At a time when Christie and Sayers were finally blooming with self-confidence, Berkeley’s disgruntlement was in danger of turning into something much more harmful.
Notes to Chapter 19
‘The Slump had spread like the plague,’ said Anthony Gilbert
My understanding of life in the Thirties has been aided by Gilbert’s memoir, and by Julian Symons’ thoughtful book about the decade.
20
Neglecting Demosthenes in Favour of Freud
Sayers celebrated her forty-first birthday as guest of honour at top table in the opulent, wood-panelled dining hall of Somerville College. Expectant faces gazed up at her as she levered herself to her feet. A few years earlier, such an occasion would have filled her with dread – a college gaudy, a reunion of alumni. Hanging on her words were dons and former students,
people she liked and respected but also feared. She had refused invitations to return to Somerville, terrified that John Anthony’s existence might become known and expose her to ridicule and contempt. Success had restored her self-esteem, and from the moment she arrived she found herself made welcome. As she proposed a toast, she brimmed with happiness, delighting her audience with her witty explanation of the value of a university education in the advertising world: a scholar’s way with words ‘is as useful in writing a slogan as in writing a sonnet’.
In the weeks leading up to the dinner, she had wrestled with two dilemmas. The simpler challenge was what to wear on returning to her alma mater. She was now very large, and very conscious of it. Buying a black coat and skirt didn’t appeal to her, so she consulted her old Somerville friend, Muriel St Claire Byrne. Would a very dark blue-grey coat and skirt be suitable in combination with academic dress? Muriel duly reassured her.
The second problem was more taxing. She had reached her peak as a detective novelist, admired equally by reviewers and readers. Yet she was working all hours, and Mac was a constant source of worry. He suffered from liver trouble and high blood pressure, and she confided that his behaviour was ‘queer and unreliable’. The damage the war had done to his morale and temper was, she felt, at the root of their marital problems. His outbursts of rage were unpredictable, and were compounded by jealousy of a wife who was achieving far more success than he could ever hope for. Yet after her motoring tour with Muriel, Sayers had decided to stick with him. She felt some residual affection for him, and feared that he would go downhill even faster if they divorced.
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