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[ "The Long Week End" opens with a :
:j striking account of the Armistice, The;
* authors then discuss any number of I
topics fashions, popular novels, inven-;
itions, psychoanalysis, night clubs, and
, the movies; the General Strike, modern i
i architecture, literary movements, and ed
ucational experiments; the depression,!
new political alignments, and pacifism;!
the Jubilee, the death of George V, the
^PeaceJ>ledge Union, hunger marches,
d Noel Coward; the ab-
ard VIII, the conference 1
outbreak of war. Here
abeth Walk, mah jong, j.
ane, the Oxford Group, !
much else that is typi- j
a fascinatingly lively 1
ic changing moods be-!
ilant days of November
isely foreboding ones of
-one long week end.
THE LONG WEEK END
A Social History of Great Britain
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK BOSTON CHICAGO DALLAS
ATLANTA SAN FRANCISCO
THE LONG WEEK ;|;NI)
A Social History of Great Britain
1918-1939
by
ROBERT GRAVES
and
ALAN HODGE
New York
THE MAGMTCTXN COMPANY
Copyright, 1941, by
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
All rights reserved no part of this book may be
reproduced in any form without permission in writing
from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes
to quote brief passages in connection with a review
written for inclusion in magazine or newspaper.
First printing.
SET UP BY BROWN BROTHERS LINOTVW5R8
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
BY THE FERRIS PRINTING COMPANY
JUL 1 8 1941
To
K.G.
in gratitude for much
hard work
6108230
Authors Note
We have done what we could to verify the facts contained in this
short history. A number of errors must still remain, if only because
the sources that we chiefly rely on memoirs and contemporary
newspapers are themselves far from trustworthy. For example,
we have lately been interested to find widespread disagreement in
the Press about even so recent and important an event as the German
re-occupation of the Rhineland: according to a large body of opin
ion it took place in March 1934, not 1936. \Ve cannot explain this.
There are also, no doubt, a great many more events and topics
that could have been included, had we thought of them, and had
time and paper been unlimited. Why, it may be asked, are silver-
fox farms not mentioned? Or the novels of Mary Webb? Or the
Antique Dealers Exhibitions? Or the Duke of Gloucester s wed
ding? Or the Gordon Bennett Balloon Race? Or the Mannin Beg
steeplechase for racing cars? Or infant welfare centres? Fill the gaps
in for yourself, please, everybody! A score of books could be writ
ten on the same general lines as ours, each completely different
from the rest.
A criticism that we feel like making ourselves is that events in
London and its environs are here treated in disproportion to events
elsewhere. But this could not be helped: the tendency was for
things either to happen first in London or to be first noted there.
We have no prejudice in favour of London and, in fact, neither
of us lived there for more than a year or two during the twenty-
one-year period with which we deal.
R.G.
A.H.
Contents
AUTHOR S NOTE page vii
1. ARMISTICE, 1918 i
2. REVOLUTION AVERTED, 1919 9
3. WOMEN 26
4. READING MATTER 40
5. POST-WAR POLITICS 54
6. VARIOUS CONQUESTS 71
7. SEX 88
8. AMUSEMENTS IO2
9. SCREEN AND STAGE 122
10. REVOLUTION AGAIN AVERTED, 1926 139
11. DOMESTIC LIFE l6o
12. ART, LITERATURE, AND RELIGION l8o
13. EDUCATION AND ETHICS 198
14. SPORT AND CONTROVERSY 214
15. THE DEPRESSION, 1930 235
1 6. PACIFISM, NUDISM:, HIKING 254
17. THE DAYS OF THE LOCH NESS MONSTER 270
1 8. RECOVERY, 1935 294
19. THE DAYS OF NON-INTERVENTION 312
ix
X CONTENTS
20. THE DEEPENING TWILIGHT OF BARBARISM page 3 2 7
21. THREE KINGS IN ONE YEAR 34^
22. KEEPING FIT AND DOING THE LAMBETH WALK 366
23. SOCIAL CONSCIENCES 3 8
24. MARKETS CLOSE FIRMER 394
25. STILL AT PEACE 4 7
26. RAIN STOPS PLAY, 1939 4 2 3
INDKX 44 r
THE LONG WEEK END
A Social History of Great Britain
1918-1939
CHAPTER ONE
Armistice, 1918
This book is intended to serve as a reliable record of what took
place, of a forgettable sort, during the twenty-one-year interval
between two great European wars.
The more newspapers people read, the shorter grows their his
torical memory; yet most people read little else. Any sudden over
whelming public event such as the outbreak of war, the coming
of peace, a general election, a large-scale strike, a ruinous financial
crisis that engrosses the headlines for days or weeks, is a sponge
for all that immediately preceded it. The cheapening in the price of
newspapers and their immediate circulation to remote villages in
the kingdom has even broken down the traditionally long memory
of the countryman. And news heard on the radio is forgotten even
sooner. In the indignant outcry against the Russians, in November
1939, when the Finns resisted their demands for a strategical fron
tier that would put Leningrad out of range of modern guns and
the Russians set up a Red Puppet Government , one thing was
universally forgotten. This was that whatever were the rights and
wrongs of the case, Britain had twenty years before formed a
legion of Red Finns, whose existence was now denied, against
General Mannerheim, their White oppressor, an ally of the Ger
mans, who was now accepted without question as the saviour of
his country. (Soon that indignant outcry too will doubtless be
forgotten.)
The Great War , which broke out on the 28th July 1914, with an
attack by the Austrian Empire on Servia, ended on the i ith Novem
ber 1918 with an armistice signed between the opposing Army
High Commands. The countries which had been drawn into the
fight on the side of Servia the name being then spelt Serbia in the
Press to remove the servile suggestion were the British, French^
2 ARMISTICE, 1918
Belgian, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Japanese Empires, Greece,
Montenegro, China, Rumania, the United States and several Latin
American Republics; on the Austrian side, the German and Turkish
Empires and Bulgaria. Peace was not to be signed for another seven
months. Though by far the greater part of the world was belliger
ent, the heaviest incidence of the war had been in Europe. Japan,
China, and the Latin American Republics had contented themselves
chiefly with despoiling what seemed to them the losing side, of
ships and other property, and selling war material to what seemed
the winning side. The United States had entered the war late, and
though they sent an expeditionary force of two million men to
France their casualties were fortunately slight in proportion to their
population about one-fiftieth of the British proportionate losses,
which in turn were about half the French and less than one-third
of the German. Materially they were richer than before, while the
British and French were impoverished, the Germans bankrupt, the
Austrians destitute. The Americans now regarded themselves as
the leading nation in the world, with most of the world s royal
metal in their safe-deposit vaults as a proof of this, and with the
indisputable glory of having decided the issue of the war, not so
much by what they did as by what they threatened to do. Their
national exuberance and the lead they gave in all social fashions,
while withdrawing politically from co-operation in restoring
world-order , is a leading factor in the 1918-39 period.
The effect on other nations of escape from the full incidence
of war must also be noted; a self-satisfaction among the Scandi
navian peoples as paladins of neutrality, who spent their public
money on social services rather than on wasteful armaments; a
sense of invincible power among the Japanese, which sent them
marching into Manchuria and China; a fatal sense among the Span
ish that they had escaped the war only by accident (their military
rulers having in general favoured the Germans, while their indus
trialists supported the French) and that they would one day have
to pay for their neutrality, which had been at the expense of
national honour.
The Germans were beaten, though not in the spectacular mili
tary way that the Bulgarians had been beaten at Salonica, the Turks
in Palestine and the Austrians on the Piave. The famous Hinden-
burg Line had been breached, but the Germans were retiring in
ARMISTICE, 1918 3
good order to other defence works. The decisive element was the
British blockade and mutiny behind the lines. The very severe
terms imposed at the Armistice were a recognition that the game
was up. At the expense of a few thousand more men the German
armies could soon have been driven back into their own territory,
because of the breakdown of their supply system. Pershing, the
American army commander, would have preferred this to an armis
tice. Perhaps he was right: a complete German rout would have
ruled out the later Nazi legend of an invincible German army that
had its glories signed away by traitors.
Most European wars in the past two hundred years have ended
in what is now derogatorily called a patched-up peace , that is to
say a peace in which the loser is forced to cede colonies or pay an
indemnity but retains national sovereignty throughout its territories
and is allowed to gather its forces for a revenge if it wishes. Our
four gentlemanly wars with France in the eighteenth century, for
example, had been of that nature. But this war was different: the
Germans, it was said, had fought it on the novel principle of delib
erately disregarding the accepted rules of European warfare. "It
was true that while individual French, British, Austrian, Turkish
and other soldiers had done numerous atrocious deeds in the course ,
of the fighting, usually in revenge for real or alleged atrocities by
the enemy, the philosophy of total war , that a war can best be
won by complete ruthlessness, was of German origin and did not
seem decently applicable to European warfare. The torpedoing of
hospital-ships, the sinking of unarmed neutral vessels without pro
vision for the crews safety, and the use of flame-throwers and
poison-gas were German introductions that genuinely shocked
British opinion; victory had therefore been looked forward to by
the British generally as a justification by force of civilized manners.
It was felt that a really severe peace must be imposed on the Ger
mans (throwing the sword into the scales with a vae victis) in pun
ishment for all the damage to property, the loss of life and the out
rage to sensibilities that they had caused to Europe. The Victory
Medal, issued soon after the war ended, officially approved the view
by styling the war The Great War for Civilization .
It must here be emphasized that by the end of 1918 there were
two distinct Britains: but not the two Britains of governing and-
governed classes, as in peace time, since the common fear of war
4 ARMISTICE, 1918
had temporarily relaxed and almost eliminated the old rigid class
distinctions. For example, a woman of aristocratic family might now
without question marry not only into the merchant class but even
into the labouring class, so long as the man she chose had a good
military or naval record John Galsworthy based a one-act play
on this phenomenon. The two Britains were: the Fighting Forces,
meaning literally the soldiers and sailors who had fought, as opposed
to garrison and line-of -communication troops, and the Rest, includ
ing the Government. They talked such different languages that
men home on leave after months on active service felt like visitors
to a foreign country and often expressed great relief to be back on
duty with their units. The reiterated conviction of the Rest, whether
genuinely felt or not, was that the Fighting Forces were heroes and
had a prior claim to anything good obtainable, in recompense for
their extraordinary sufferings and exertions; and the Fighting Forces
accepted this as their due, understanding that the gratitude would
continue when victory was won, and that the world would be their
football as soon as they were demobilized.
The official propaganda machine, under Lord Northcliffe s
direction, had been busy spreading atrocity stories against the Ger
mans which it did not take the trouble to verify, or to contradict
if found untrue. Very many of these such as the one about the
Germans extracting fat and other raw materials from human
corpses, and about the crucified Canadian, and about picked Ger
man soldiers being sent back on leave to inseminate war-widows
and other husbandless women were as false as they were plausible,
and accepted without question by the Rest. But the partial or dis
honest war-communiques and over-cheerful despatches from the
field by special correspondents shocked the Fighting Forces, who
knew the facts, and undermined their simple faith in the printed
word. In the end, the disasters of war taught them a gradual dis
gust for the muddle-through 7 politicians who spoke in the name
of Britain; bitter anger against the General Staff, who from safe
billets behind the Line condemned hundreds and thousands of men
to useless butchery; and a contempt, mixed with envy, for all fit
males of military age, even technicians in key-industries, who had
escaped their share of front-line service. Into the last class fell all
young ministers of religion, except Roman Catholic chaplains, who
were admired as always at hand to give extreme unction to the
ARMISTICE, 1918 5
dying, and the exceptional Dissenting or Anglican Woodbine
Willies who lent the stretcher-bearers a hand on bad days, but
with one or two exceptions were regarded as comic turns rather
than heroes. The B.E.F. were in general irreligious: they had
reduced morality to the single virtue of loyalty. The Seven Deadly
Sins of Pride, Envy, Lust, Avarice, Intemperance, Anger and Sloth
were venial, so long as a man was courageous and a reasonably
trustworthy comrade. God as an all-wise Providence was dead;
blind Chance succeeded to the Throne.
This view naturally induced a perverse sympathy for the Ger
man fighting men opposite; and the simple sentiment was tediously
reiterated that if the Kaiser, the Crown Prince, Hindenburg and
Company were put into one trench and the British Government
were put into another and both parties forced to throw bombs at
each other, peace would be signed within three minutes. It was, of
course, admitted that the German Government was malignant,
while the British Government was just criminally stupid. The trend
of feeling was thus towards ideal anarchism and the consoling
apres-la-guerre-finie hopes of the serving soldier included two prin
cipal items: first a crushing of the German Government, by a defeat
of the German Army, and next a clean sweep in Britain of all
oppressors, cheats, cowards, skrimshankers, reactionaries and liars
who had plagued and betrayed him during his service. The mood
is most clearly and forcibly presented in Counter Attack, a book of
poems by an infantry officer, Siegfried Sassoon, published before
the war ended. The Lower Deck had much the same feelings,
though the sailor s respect for the Germans against whom he fought
was lower than that of the soldier, especially after the scuttling of
the German Fleet at Scapa Flow. This anarchic mood was not con
structive. Few wished to build a new world , as the politicians
promised; the general intention was merely to cleanse the old one.
The average man thought fondly of stepping back into civvies and
resuming his original job, with the sole difference that he would
no longer be b d about by people in authority. And the eman
cipated women war-workers, some millions of them, thought the
same.
The popular newspapers during the latter part of the war always
referred to the Germans as Huns . The shortness of the term recom
mended it to caption writers, and it had a historical reference: the
6 ARMISTICE, 1918
Kaiser in sending off the German contingent to the relief of the
Foreign Legations at Pekin in 1900 had exhorted them to show
themselves as ruthless and terrible to the Chinese as had the Huns.
The implication was that the policy of barbarity in modern war had
been initiated by the Kaiser on this occasion. This was not quite
fair. There had always been a tacit understanding that a different
code might be used by European nations against savages who
would not appreciate the civilized courtesies of war; and the Chi
nese Boxers had indeed put themselves into the uncivilized category
by their obscene mutilation of British marines. The British had
taken this line in most of their colonial wars, and in 1914 the Ger
man professional officers were shocked to find that British officers
were breaking the Hague Convention by carelessly using revolver
bullets of the soft-nosed sort that had been necessary for stopping
the fanatical Dervishes. Few soldiers in the war used the word
Hun ; the common terms for German being Fritz , Jerry ,
Heinie , Squarehead , and Uoche , the last borrowed from the
French, short for Caboche or cabbage-head . Horatio Bottomley s
John Bul^ the widest-read weekly paper, tried to popularize the
clumsy form Germ-Huns , but without success.
The propaganda campaign had been remarkably successful. The
Rest of Britain, not feeling the freedom, which active service over
seas alone conferred, to question or criticize the official voices, had
been whipped into a blind hatred of all things German. Rudyard
Kipling did some of the whipping. He wrote a popular short story
about an English spinster who allowed a German airman to die
before her eyes without giving him even a drink of water; and con
veyed his approval of her attitude. He also wrote a poem: When
the English Began to Hate. The English meant the Rest, not the
Fighting Forces. This hatred was almost the only emotional luxury
allowed them; but they had taken to church-going and to cultivat
ing virtues at which the Fighting Forces mocked, such as High
Endeavour, Humility, Thrift, Prudence, Sobriety. In schools there
had been a return, under dug-out masters, to an almost monastic
discipline; imposed by an appeal to the boys to prove yourselves
worthy of your brothers, who are now making the supreme
sacrifice .
These two disparate Britains were slowly and confusedly to
ARMISTICE, 1918 7
unite in the period that came to be called, in a wistful or disparaging
tone, The Careless Twenties ,
At the Armistice, the sudden cessation of the artillery fire which
had continued ceaselessly on the Western Front for more than four
years had an almost frightening effect on the troops. It was as if the
kitchen clock had stopped at eleven o clock in the morning and the
household was uncertain as to when the potatoes should be put on
to boil, if at all. When the guns stop had been a synonym for
when the war is over. Yet was it over? The men were warned
that they could expect no more than a temporary lull, and sternly
forbidden to fraternize with the enemy. It was only very gradually
that the realization came that the war was indeed over. The Army
was thus in a sense cheated of a manifestation: for by the time that
the official victory celebrations were held, the story was already
nine months stale and had begun to stink a little. A few young offi
cers who could get local leave from their units did immediately
celebrate what was known as a beano in the nearest French town;
but there were no scenes in the trenches even remotely resembling
those that took place at home. There the lighter-hearted part of
the population ran mad, the lead being taken by Dominion soldiers
and airmen with their women friends. The constabulary in many
towns had orders not to intervene in any scene of disorder what
ever, unless fire or loss of life threatened. There were extraordinary
scenes of jovialty. Guns captured in battle were pulled in proces
sion round the towns to which they had been officially presented
and pushed off bridges or quays. Sexual affairs between perfect
strangers took place promiscuously in parks, shop entrances and
alley-ways. In the Cornmarket, Oxford, a woman paraded up and
down the street waving a flag, with her skirts kilted up to her naked
middle, and was cheered as a sort of presiding Venus by the Army
and Air cadets quartered in the colleges. At Cambridge the cadets
attacked and smashed up the office of the Cambridge Magazine, the
only literary periodical that had been pacifist in policy.
The first night was everywhere haphazardly celebrated, but
given a dignity, in London, by the appearance of King George and
Queen Mary on the balcony of Buckingham Palace to bow
acknowledgements to the wildly cheering crowd. Trafalgar Square
8 ARMISTICE, 1918
was the focus of disorder. Here a party of Dominion soldiers tore
down a watchman s hut to make a Victory Bonfire at the base of
Nelson s Column. The pediment, the usual stand for speakers at
Sunday demonstrations, is scarred to this day. The second night
was pretty thick base plans having been concocted for taking
advantage of the general licence. On the third night the police put
on the brake, and some arrests were made.
CHAPTER TWO
Revolution Averted, 1919
The problem that now faced the Government, local authorities,
and what were conveniently known as Vested interests , was how
to smother the threat of social revolution which the Fighting Forces
constituted. The time-honoured solution was to soothe them with
handsome promises until they were safely demobilized, meanwhile
depicting the dangers and penalties of revolt in the most horrid
colours. The first step, therefore, was for the Government to go
to the country for a vote of confidence in themselves as the men
who had won the war and would now win the peace. The snap
General Election that December was later called the Khaki Election
on the analogy of the Boer War election of 1900. Actually, the
vote of the Fighting Forces was largely annulled by this hurried
manoeuvre, because the new voters, though allowed to vote by
proxy, had not yet been put on the registers. Besides, the Opposi
tion to the Coalition Government had not had time to raise its head
from the dust into which the Defence of the Realm Act had
crushed it; so that in most constituencies no alternative candidate
was offered to the Lloyd George nominee.
The election went off quietly, even apathetically. Barely half
the electorate in the London Boroughs voted; and in the provinces
the proportion was not much higher. Demobilization had been
undertaken so cautiously that only a few of the first category in the
order of precedence schoolmasters and other harmless specialists
had been able to get home for the poll.
The Rest of Britain looked upon Lloyd George, The Wizard
of Wales , with fascinated reverence, and expected him to build the
new world order with a wave of his wand, while they relaxed. It
was to them that the political catchwords Hang the Kaiser and
Make Germany Pay were addressed. To the Fighting Forces, Lloyd
10 REVOLUTION AVERTED, I 9! 9
George made promises which he was unable to fulfil and which
eventually discredited him: the chief one being that slums would
soon be swept away from the face of Britain and homes fit for
heroes constructed in their place. The result of the election was an
enormous Coalition majority, consisting of highly amenable mem
bers, few of whom had previous parliamentary experience. Such a
majority has always been dangerous as tempting a government to
override, either in idleness or over-busyness, all criticism from both
inside and outside the House. The Liberal Party that had been so
securely in power before the war was divided against itself: most
candidates received a Coalition coupon as followers of Lloyd
George, and of those who remained true to Asquith (whom Lloyd
George had ousted from office in 1916 as a result of popular clamour
largely instigated by the Daily Mail) only twenty-seven got elected
they were known as the c Wee Frees . Sixty-two Labour mem
bers brought the forces of the Opposition up to eighty-nine; the
Coalition securing 516 seats. The disparity would have been less
grotesque had the seventy-three Irish Nationalists, then called Sinn
Feiners, taken their seats. The Irish vote had traditionally been the
sliding make-weight between the two elder parties. But the Sinn
Feiners unanimously refused to take the Oath of Allegiance, and
consequently could not sit. Among them was the Countess Mar-
kiewicz (nee Gore-Booth), who had won an infamous notoriety
for shooting a wounded British policeman during the Troubles.
The Countess was the only woman elected to Parliament: a gen
erally disappointing result of the new law by which, as a reward for
their war services, women were for the first time allowed both to
vote and to become members of Parliament. It was not, however,
full adult suffrage that had been granted them, as to the men:
though women over twenty-one were allowed to stand for election,
only women over thirty were allowed to vote. It was expected that
these elder women, uninfected with the revolutionary mood that
possessed the younger ones who had done the hardest and most
thankless war-work would be an asset to the party of law and
order with which the Coalition now identified themselves. It was
also calculated that few women in the early thirties would care to
register as voters, for fear of revealing their age: in those days
excessive delicacy was still observed in the matter of mentioning a
woman s age. The safeness of women voters was emphasized in
REVOLUTION AVERTED, IpIQ II
the Press: a woman writer in the Daily Mail was encouraged to
observe, for example, that we women think that the things in life
that really matter will count for more, and that the squabbles of the
"in s and out s" will count for less, because of the women s vote .
The violent heroines of the pre-War Suffragette movement, who
had disfigured putting-greens with vitriol and chained themselves
to railings, and screamed, were almost forgotten. This granting of
the vote to the elder women created far less excitement than the sub
sequent enfranchisement of women of twenty-one the so-called
Flapper s Vote which was held by most Conservatives to be a
gratuitous present to the forces of revolution.
Though the Great War was over, so far as the fighting was con
cerned, the blockade against Germany was being relentlessly
enforced until the disarmament terms of the Armistice should be
fulfilled and Peace duly signed. Several smaller wars too were still
in progress. British troops co-operating with the White generals,
Koltchak and Denikin, against the U.S.S.R. sent partly to secure
British investments in Russia, partly to identify the British Army
with an anti-revolutionary cause were not withdrawn before
1920. The war against the Sinn Fein guerillas in Ireland continued
until 1922; the Turkish-Greek dispute until the Treaty of Lausanne
in 1923. War had been almost the sole topic of conversation for
four and a half years, and it was puzzling at first for the newspapers
to find any peace topic sufficiently captivating to replace war news.
At the end of 1918, when the country, owing to its tremendous
shipping losses and the necessity of still maintaining an army of
some millions, continued under severe restrictions in food, clothing,
coal, and other necessities, and German prisoners of war, with col
oured patches sewn on their clothes to prevent their escape, were
still working on the land, it was natural that the papers should go
on printing war-pictures. The Illustrated London News in Novem
ber and December was publishing photographs and detailed imagi
native drawings of the Austrian, Bulgarian, and German surrenders;
of the German Fleet approaching Scapa Flow; of the secrets of the
Q-ships; of the Allied armies on guard in Cologne. For a full year
more the Daily Mail continued to call itself The Soldier s Paper .
But, in general, though people were willing to read epilogue news
of the war which they had won, they showed little interest in the
highly coloured reports of the victorious progress of tt*e White
12 REVOLUTION AVERTED, 1919
Russian armies, or blood-curdling stories of Red atrocities. A letter-
writer to The Times remarked on the public indifference to the
murder of Tsar Nicholas, and himself made a sober comment in a
Latin elegiac couplet:
Sir, if the story told in The Times a few weeks ago of the Bol
sheviks murder of the Tsar Nicholas II and his Consort and their
family was as true as The Times seemed to think it, it was as
execrable a crime of its sort as history records. Yet no comment
upon it of any sort has followed, so far as I have seen. It occurred
to me to write an epitaph suggested by Dido s dying cry for
retribution:
Virtutis humani nos praeda jacemus; et ultor
Ossibus e nostris exoriare aliquisP
Death was still extremely active that winter: but with pestilence,
not shot, shell, and gas. For the first two years of the war the oppos
ing armies had been remarkably free of infectious disease, despite
mud and lice. But then came a new epidemic called Spanish or
septic influenza: gathering force in 1917 and reaching its height
in the winter of 1918-19. It killed twenty-seven million people,
throughout the world twice as many as the war itself with the
heaviest mortality in the territories least affected by the fighting.
Nearly the whole populations of certain areas of Asia and Africa
were swept away by it: 8,500,000 died in India alone. In Germany
influenza had contributed very largely to the Revolution, the Brit
ish blockade having weakened physical resistance to it; and even in
the United Kingdom, where the population was comparatively well
fed and clothed, over 200,000 deaths were recorded. New Zealand
and Australian troops fell particularly easy victims, as extensive
graveyards on Salisbury Plain and elsewhere still remind us. In Eng
land entire households, and even streets of households, were often
dangerously ill in bed at the same time with nobody to look after
them. A severe coal shortage aggravated matters. To Hun-haters
it was some consolation that the mortality was twice as great in
Germany. In the summer of 1919 there was a recurrence of the
epidemic, but its victims were fewer. In church, trains, and other
public places people wore antiseptic masks of flesh-coloured gauze
over nose and mouth.
- * REVOLUTION AVERTED, IQIQ 13
vemr. 1
The general mood of weary relief at the end of the war was
reflected in advertisements. Army Club cigarettes showed a girl
and a man in uniform, with this dialogue:
She: Thank goodness it s all over now, Jack, we can settle
down to peace and plenty.
He: Rather, dear old thing, give me plenty of Army Club cigs
and I m at peace with the whole bally world/
Yet in an advertisement for Beecham s Pills there was a sense
of foreboding that peace might not be everything that it had been
expected. A girl with cards, gazing into a crystal for fortune-
telling was enjoying a huge popularity among people who had lost
relatives in the war, or who were beginning life afresh was saying:
Yes, there s a bright future before you if you take Beecham s
Pills.
Serious voices were, of course, emphasizing the grave peace-time
problems confronting the country and the necessity of united
national effort: the high endeavour note was sounded by states
men, the Church, and a few newspapers. About this time, for
example, the Conservative and sedate Country Life condemned a
new volume of W. H. Davies s poems, as a number of lascivious
little love poems, very much out of keeping with the time . And
the reviewer went on to say, Equally unworthy of the spirit of
the age is the song:
They re taxing Ale again, I hear,
A penny more the can:
They re taxing poor old Ale again,
The only honest man.
The radical New Statesman similarly deplored the frivolousness
of people s reaction to their release from the strain of war. From a
January 1919 article on Village Topics : Meanwhile, round about,
"shoots" are going on. Hounds are killing or drawing blank. Esti
mates are being prepared for the refitting of yachts. The merits of
rival designs for new motor-cars are being discussed, and dodges for
enticing young women into domestic service. Plans are being made
for world-wide travel. The wines of the future, the price of season-
tickets and of suits and millinery, the decline of the poetry-boom,
the fullness of restaurants, the prospects of the theatre these fur
nish topics of animated conversation. And the necessity of a bath-
1048849
14 REVOLUTION AVERTED, 1919
room for each guest-room in the after- war house is frankly admit
ted. It is almost astonishing: it is wildly funny, having regard to
the fact that millions of people are starving in Europe. . . .
But it was hard work to organize peace-time pleasures, even in
the country. Gardening, for example, had suffered a tremendous
setback since 1916 by the gradual destruction of ornamental shrubs
and trees to make room for potatoes and cabbages. The extremely
cold winter of 1917-18 had killed many survivors and the lack of
fuel for greenhouses had allowed some of the rarer varieties to die
out altogether. Game birds had been neglected; and as for horses,
few of the hunters that had been bought up for the Army had
returned in condition. The breeding of dogs and other pets had
also been so discouraged by the war that pedigree puppies were
almost unobtainable. To make matters worse a widespread outbreak
of rabies, the first for a great many years, made an order necessary
for the compulsory muzzling of dogs. Muzzling was a problem,
because the huge number of muzzles required could not be supplied
in a hurry, and many dogs, especially short-nosed kinds, such as
Pekinese, were exceedingly difficult to fit. The outbreak was due
to the evasion of the usual quarantine at British ports by R.A.F.
officers in France, who flew their pets over. The most fashionable
dogs of the moment were Alsatians, which had been used in the
Belgian and French armies as watch-dogs in outposts and as chiens
sanitaires for ministering to the wounded. Their striking appear
ance and the legend of their wolfish ancestry well suited the new
sporting scene. They were at first called variously, Police dogs ,
Continental (or German) sheepdogs , Chiens loups , Malinois ,
and Loups de Lorraine : until an Alsatian Wolf -Dog Club was
formed, with Lieut.-Col. Moore-Brabazon, the pioneer motorist
and airman, as secretary. The club set itself to popularize these dogs,
noted for their Vigilance, fidelity, and suspiciousness towards
strangers , and to see to it that the patriotic Allied name Alsatian
should be universally observed. In the following year The Times
declared: c To-day it is about as easy to buy an Alsatian as to rent
a house or a flat in London. A good specimen can be sold for 300,
and any sort of pedigree puppy cannot be bought for less than
sixty guineas.
As for metropolitan pleasures, a sprightly writer for The By
stander complained: Even the least observant must rub their eyes
REVOLUTION AVERTED, 1919 15
at the wild metamorphosis of London from war to peace. . . .
Those forgotten aeons when, at certain times of the day, anyway,
there were seats and to spare in the tubes and buses. Or when cars
actually "plied" for hire. Or, when at restaurants you could get a
quite good dinner for a mere i, without any insolence from waiter
people and with vin ordinaire a lot less than 6s. or ys. a bottle. And
when, even at Christmas time, shop-assistants remembered that but
for US they wouldn t cut much ice.
Indeed, there was more money than goods about. Production
had to be readjusted to peace-time conditions, and during the
interval prices were high, and some goods had still to be rationed.
Christmas had been the favourite date, every year, by which the
war was confidently expected to end; but for this first peace-time
Christmas practically no toys could be bought at any price, and the
glass bottles in the confectioners shops stood as empty as they had
for the last two Christmases.
The But for US theme was fretfully reiterated meanwhile in
every camp and barrack at home and overseas where troops waited
for relief or demobilization. The volunteer soldier was desperately
home-sick, and now that the war was over, except in name, saw no
reason why he should not go home and get back his peace-time
job before someone else took it. He had only enlisted for the dura
tion . But Army discipline, instead of being relaxed, was intensified,
and the only relief from spit-and-polish parades was educational
lectures on subjects that seemed to him very remote. There were
protests, strikes, and even mutinies among the troops left in France.
Lord Byng was sent to Calais, in January 1919, to deal with an ugly
situation: a Soviet had been established among two thousand
infantry, and the Army Service and Royal Army Ordnance Corps
men were on strike. All were dissatisfied with bad food, worse ac
commodation and delays in demobilization. Lord Byng settled the
mutiny without bloodshed; but it was allowed to remain publicly
unrecorded for some years. A similar mutiny of about two thousand
details of the five Guards regiments stationed at Shoreham camp, in
Sussex, broke out two months later. They marched into Brighton,
amid friendly cheers from the crowds along the roads, to lodge a
protest with the Mayor, who received them so graciously that they
returned to camp feeling that something had been done. Their
immediate grievances were indeed attended to by a sympathetic
1 6 REVOLUTION AVERTED, 1919
emissary from London, and the exemplary sentences that awaited
the ring-leaders were not promulgated for some time, when the
danger of further disturbance had disappeared.
Books and newspaper articles about the war grew unfashionable
as demobilization gathered momentum. Already, in January 1919,
Ralph Straus wrote in a literary column: War books have suddenly
become "dud". I can think of no better word. Yet I imagine that a
volume devoted to those secret things of war which have not yet
been explained should have a success quite out of the ordinary. For
the public was not interested in the official histories of battles and of
regiments which were beginning to appear, nor in the memoirs of
generals and admirals; though the names of French and Jellicoe on
the cover automatically sold a few thousand copies. No historian
yet had the courage to give the facts truthfully, even if he had the
inclination. The propaganda habit of suppressing disgraceful events
persisted, the Defence of the Realm Act being still in force in many
of its articles. Conversation about the war died down even before
the Peace Celebrations. Among regular soldiers it soon came to be
regarded as bad form, especially since the senior officers and N.C.O.s
of the reorganized battalions had in most cases seen little regimental
service having either been employed on staff duties or spent most
of the war in German or Turkish prison camps. Civilians were only
too glad to suppress all memory of the nightmare from which they
had just awakened, and the only intelligent audience for the reminis
cences of ex-servicemen being their fellow ex-servicemen, the topic
of this rag-time f g peace succeeded that of this bloody f g
war . (The habit of continuous obscene language, which a long
and miserable war has always induced, persisted for four or five
years more and had even spread to the younger women.)
The revolutionary tendency among the Fighting Forces had
been idealistic rather than practical: one reason being that everyone
who had served in the trenches for as much as five months, or who
had been under two or three rolling artillery barrages, was an in
valid. Shell-shock , from which all suffered to a greater or less
degree, was a condition of alternate moods of apathy and high
excitement, with very quick reaction to sudden emergencies but no
capacity for concentrated thinking. It was credibly explained as a
morbid condition of the blood, due to the stimulation of the thyroid
gland by noise and fear. Shell-shock, which brought distressing
REVOLUTION AVERTED, 1919 17
nightmares with it, often affected its victims with day-visions and
warped their critical sense. Its effects passed off very gradually. In
most cases the blood was not running pure again for four or five
years; and in numerous cases men who had managed to avoid a
nervous breakdown during the war collapsed badly in 192 1 or 1922.
Many officers and N.C.O.s, especially in shock-divisions and the
Royal Air Force, had also become confirmed whisky and rum
addicts. The problem of the re-absorption of these men into civil
life was complicated by their unfitness for any work that needed
reliable judgement and steady application. They had been led to
believe that the fact of having served honourably at the Front
would be a safe coupon for employment; whereas, on the contrary,
the more exhausting their service had been, the smaller was the
peace-time demand for them. A million men found that their old
jobs had either disappeared or were held by someone else usually
a woman, or a man who had escaped conscription.
To keep them quiet until the expected Peace Boom started, the
Government gave every member of the Fighting Forces below
commissioned rank a free Unemployment Insurance policy, which
entitled him to benefit while he was seeking work. No steps were
taken at first to provide for munition-workers, or other civilians
who had been employed in war-work. A similar scheme, however,
was hurriedly devised to cover them, and in 1920 their position was
regulated by extending the original Unemployment Insurance pro
visions of 1911 to cover all classes of manual workers, except agri
cultural labourers and domestic servants. Unemployment was not
allowed to depress the wage-rates of those who continued in work,
for the Wages Act of 1918 stabilized the wages then in force.
No provision was made for ex-officers, on the assumption that
they had either private means or useful connections. For many of
these the problem of employment was acute. Some enlisted in the
ranks and were sent to Cologne to the Army of Occupation; some,
the wilder spirits, joined the special police force in Ireland, nick
named the Black and Tans, and there showed remarkable savagery
for to them the Irish were traitors who had stajbbed England in
the back in the Easter Week rebellion of 1916, and deserved no
mercy. Many used their savings, wound-gratuities and the custom
ary Victory bounty (proportioned to pay) to set up in independent
businesses, causing a great demand for small offices and extor-
l8 REVOLUTION AVERTED, 1919
donate rents. Most of these businesses failed soon after they had
started, and their owners drifted into the employment of large com
mercial and industrial firms. Younger officers crowded back to the
Universities on Government scholarships to complete their inter
rupted education. Colonels, majors, and captains were plentiful
among these aged undergraduates. They showed condescension
rather than respect to the dons, and made it clear that they would
stand for no nonsense the word Soviet was heard again at Oxford
when the undergraduates at St. John s College took united action
against what they considered tyranny in the catering department
and successfully demanded reform and representation. On the
whole, the absorption of soldiers into civil life went on fairly
smoothly: by November 1920 the unemployment figure had
dropped to half a million.
Until the Germans had signed on the dotted line, and for some
little time afterwards, even the unemployed were still officially
heroes . They were entreated to have patience with the unavoid
able confusion caused by the switch-over from war to peace: and
especially to do nothing to embarrass those of their rulers who had
gone in January to Versailles to remodel the map of the world. Most
soldiers on their return found conditions, however difficult, such a
vast improvement on active service in the field that they did not
at first grumble. To be able to sleep all night on a spring mattress,
to have the company of women and children, to be done with mud
and trench-rats or tropical heat and flies, to be given something else
to eat than bully-beef, biscuit, and plum-and-apple jam, and above
all to be absolute masters of their spare time such relief made them
care very little what was going on in the public way. And all seemed
to be going pretty well. The Government was indeed interesting
itself actively in reconstruction. In February 1919 Lloyd George
summoned a National Industrial Conference, and appealed to it
for assistance in preserving national unity. The Conference recom
mended that a maximum working-week of forty-eight hours and
minimum rates of pay should be made universal. Meanwhile,
throughout 1919 Whitley Councils and Trade Boards were being
formed in most industries. These were named after the chairman,
J. H. Whitley, of the commission that had recommended their
formation he later became Speaker of the House of Commons,
REVOLUTION AVERTED, 1919 19
Their purpose was to enable employers and workers to co-operate
in settling trade disputes.
The Peace Conference news roused little popular interest by
comparison with events of a more happily pre-war flavour, such
as the resumption of racing and prospects of seaside holidays. The
popular Press was obliged to recognize this need for distraction.
Only a few newspapers, of small circulation, described the task
before the Peace Conference as enough to sober the thoughts of
every serious person 7 , and held that the Allies were creating the
machinery for a safe civilization and a better-ordered world. If the
machinery could not be created, or if it proved defective, they
declared, the immediate future might be even worse than the
immediate past. They kept up this note for several months, occa
sionally glancing aside to reprove the ambitions of Poland, Rumania,
and Italy; but were generally unheeded.
The Government did not stint the public of parades. In March/
the Guards Division marched from Buckingham Palace to the City,
through densely crowded streets. The dominant note of the specta
tors, so the newspapers said, was one of pride and thankfulness: for
they were neither weary of military spectacles, nor ungrateful for
sacrifices rendered, nor unmindful of glory gained . After this the
Australians had their day, and then the Canadians. And at the end
of May there were mild celebrations at the signing of Peace. As
usual, crowds gathered outside Buckingham Palace and cheered the
King and Queen and the Royal Family. At Downing Street, Lloyd
George was prevailed upon to address a crowd from his windows,
and in the House of Commons he was cheered the Members rose
and sang the National Anthem in unison. Then, as though Armistice
Day and Peace Day had not been enough, the people were promised
an official Victory Day for July 9th. The only newspaper that took
the line Now they are ringing the bells, soon they will be wringing
their hands , on the grounds that the Peace terms were intolerably
severe and an unjust enslavement of the German people for genera
tions to come, was the almost unread Daily Herald,
The war had now to be solidly commemorated by public sub
scription. Plans were made for the organization of vast war ceme
teries in France, and in every village in England the problem of the
local war memorial was raging where should it be placed? What
20 REVOLUTION AVERTED, 1919
form should it take statue, obelisk, or cross? Could the names of
all the dead be inscribed on it? Or would it not be more sensible to
use the money collected for a recreation ground and engrave the
names on an inexpensive plaque in the church? So great was the
demand for war-memorial designs and so puzzled were committees
as to where they should go for them that the Medici Society inserted
a full-page disclaimer in the weekly journals: In view of the daily
enquiries for price-lists, catalogues, etc., of War Memorials, the
Medici Society begs to repeat that it does not supply "stock de
signs", nor issue price-lists or catalogues of Memorials. Funds were
also collected to buy out of Continental slavery the faithful British
transport horses that had been left behind in France and Belgium.
And the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals
launched a 20,000 Soldiers Dog Fund, describing as a tragedy of
peace the fact that Tommy and his pal must say good-bye on the
other side of the water unless the public intervened with their usual
generosity. The public, of course, did.
Meanwhile Great Britain was slowly recovering its peace-time
appearance. Khaki had disappeared from the streets, naked lights
were permitted at night, munition works had closed down or
switched over to peace-time production, newspaper placards ceased
to be overprinted on old newspapers, the spy-fever ended. Tobacco
restrictions were removed in January 1919, food-coupons were
abolished in May and bread-rationing in August; but sugar-rationing
went on until November 1920, and licensing restrictions were only
very slightly relaxed for the rest of the period.
On Victory Day a great Allied Parade was held. That night
there were numerous parties. In the Berkeley Hotel all diners were
given crackers and trumpets, dolls and golliwogs. When the
trumpets sounded, an officer of the ipth Hussars jumped up and
proposed a toast to The Fox-Hunt ; and all joined riotously in sing
ing John Peel . In Hyde Park, at the same time, there was a public
display of fireworks.
Peace-making was not yet over. The Bystander reminded its
readers that, though peace had been made with Germany, Britain
was still playing the policeman in Fiume, Constantinople, Palestine,
Mesopotamia (which had in the mouths of the Little Englanders
become Mespot ), India, Siberia, Hong Kong and Singapore. The
public, however, was unperturbed. Germany at least was beaten
REVOLUTION AVERTED, 1919 21
and these minor problems of the peace did not concern them much.
The League of Nations was suspect, as an instrument for keeping
Britain tied to the troubles of Europe; still, it seemed only fair to
give the thing a trial, and some even had profound faith in it. Punch,
on the first anniversary of Armistice Day, awarded a kindly cartoon
to Viscount Cecil, who was starting his campaign to make the aims
of the League better understood.
Germany was not yet, of course, included in the League, but
regarded officially as a moral outcast. Nothing known to be of Ger
man origin could be sold in the shops and even the war-time ban on
German classical music remained in force for some time. The pop
ular Press continued to refer to the Germans as Huns even so late
as 1920; nor was any faith given to the complaint of Germans
during the Armistice period that they were starving as many of
them were. In January 1919 The Times proved to its own satisfac
tion that this complaint was the latest, but not the last proof of a
mean and lying and greedy spirit : northwestern Germany, The
Times maintained, was amply supplied with provisions in fact,
raw food was even seen going to waste. Punch, in February, pro
duced a cartoon of the German Criminal saying to the Allied Police
man: Stop, you re hurting me, and then aside: If I only whine
enough I may be able to wriggle out of this yet. Punch continued
to reflect this official view of German baseness with cartoons, in
May, entitled Germany draws the pen and keeps it rattling and
Honour satisfied . The text to the latter was, German Delegate:
"Sign? I d sooner die." Aside: "Give me the pen." And in Septem
ber, with a note of alarm, came a cartoon: The New German
offensive , representing the German commercial traveller about to
invade Britain.
Liberal papers, on the other hand, took the view that, now that
the Hohenzollerns were dethroned, no cause for fear remained.
Germany would be democratic, though perhaps a little more author
itative (the word authoritarian had not yet come in) than other
democratic countries. The German people, it was felt, would never
again let their fate pass out of their own hands. And the daring New
Statesman poked fun at the hue-and-cry after the Kaiser: Looking
through the newspapers the other day I found Mr. Tillett calling
for his ex-Majesty s removal from earth, Sir Gilbert Parker demand
ing his internment in some distant island, and Lady Byron supple-
22 REVOLUTION AVERTED, 1919
meriting a plan for a judicial investigation with the palpably biased
remark that, should the defendant not be condemned to the gallows
or the guillotine, then the foulest deed must be applauded and floral
tributes laid on the shrine of Satan.
Even the soldiers who had expressed a fellow-feeling for their
fellow-unfortunates on the other side of no-man s-land could not
now spare much pity or thought for German ex-servicemen and
their families; though generosity was shown by the Army of Occu
pation to German civilians in distress. It was not as if food was
either plentiful or cheap in England: and, after all, who had started
the war and who had lost it? Besides, there was a great housing
shortage, and recently married men were wondering for how many
more months, or years, they would have to live with their wives
parents or their own. For five years the building trade had been at a
standstill few repairs, even, had been done. The number of skilled
builders had been halved during the war, because the trade had no
chance to recruit apprentices. What skilled labour there was had
more repair work in hand than it could manage. The Sphere in
September 1919 observed that all over London the work of painting
and repairing walls, windows and railings was in progress; Down
ing Street by then was only just refurbished. To make matters
worse, streets and roads had been neglected during the war, and
throughout 1919 gangs of roadmakers were busy in all London s
thoroughfares. Nearly the whole of Oxford Street was dug up and
relaid in a single operation.
At first, very few new houses were built. Even in 1921, the
British census showed 750,000 more families than separate dwell
ings. This was remarkable, because just before the war it had been
reckoned that there were more unoccupied houses in London than
occupied houses in Paris. Owing to the scarcity of materials the cost
of building rose enormously: it was impossible to put up houses
which could be let at the prevailing controlled rents. A Director-
General of Housing was appointed in 1919 to help local authorities
and private builders with subsidies; but these were not sufficiently
attractive to start a housing boom. In 1920 a Ministry of Health
house of a working-class type cost 900 to erect, even though in
different materials were used unseasoned wood and uncohesive
plaster; and wages were lagging behind the rise in prices. In conse
quence, many respectable families went to live in old houses that
REVOLUTION AVERTED, 1919 23
had been awkwardly cut up into flats, in mews, in army huts,
wooden and metal, roughly adapted to civil life, and even in old
railway carriages, and converted coal barges and lighters.
Yet, despite everything, people were determined to enjoy them
selves. Professional cricket was revived, yachting at Cowes, and
polo and hunt-balls though there was still a great shortage at these
of male partners. The Derby was a record one: since the beginning
of the year everyone had been talking in a most extravagant way of
the favourite, Sir Alec Black s The Panther , as the greatest horse
of the age. The first big disappointment of the peace was when The
Panther came in fourth; Lord Glanely s Grand Parade being the
winner at 33-1. Opera enjoyed a great social season; Dame Melba
was at the height of her popularity. Russian Ballet, too, with La
Boutique Fantasque , Tetrouschka , and The Three-Cornered Hat
as the most popular pieces and Massine, Karsavina, and Lopokova
to dance them. One consolation for the Russian Revolution was
that it had left half the Imperial Ballet School permanently exiled
abroad. At Wimbledon Mile Suzanne Lenglen began her long
domination of the British lawn-tennis courts by defeating Mrs.
Lambert Chambers. At Henley the regatta was held again, and the
victory of an Australian eight over Oxford in one of the events
assisted the prevailing sentiment of Imperial goodwill. In the course
of a military tournament at Olympia real tanks charged obstruc
tions in the arena, and sent bricks and mortar flying splendidly. And
between parades and sporting events there was always some social
happening to engross the attention. The smartest was the wedding
of Lady Diana Manners, the reigning beauty of the day, to young
Alfred Duff Cooper the last social wedding that crowds and
crowds of factory girls talked about and turned out to see. Later in
the Twenties it was only film stars that could attract such crowds.
Lady Diana was fortunate; at the moment when glamour was turn
ing from peers to stars, she was both an actress (the Nun in The
Miracle and a duke s daughter.
In August came the great holiday scramble. Thousands of people
set off for the sea on their first holiday for five years* The seaside
towns were overwhelmed. Fifty thousand people went to Yarmouth
from London alone. Clacton received thirty-five thousand more
people than it could accommodate. Sofas in living-rooms and tem
porary beds in bathrooms were snapped up. Blackpool had more
24 REVOLUTION AVERTED, 1919
than three hundred thousand visitors. Hundreds were obliged to
xeturn home after a fruitless search for lodgings; hundreds walked
the streets all night, or slept on sand-hills and cliff -tops. The police,
in some cases, allowed women and children to occupy cells at police
stations. The beaches were black with crowds; queues waited out
side bathing-machines and dressing-tents for their turn to swim.
The London County Council thoughtfully provided, for the chil
dren of those who could not get away, heaps of specially refined
sand in St. James s Park, railed off in play-corners. But bereaved
wives and parents who could afford to do so went on personally
conducted tours to the Devastated Regions and ate picnics in the
trenches with old ammunition-boxes as makeshift tables. Towards
the end of the year Continental holidays became possible again.
St. Moritz was popular for skating and skiing as yet expertness in
skating was more common than in skiing among society people.
The illustrated weeklies during the winter of 1919-20 were full of
photographs of Lord So-and-So s party on skates. The Riviera too
was packed, thousands of people going south in spite of the acute
coal-shortage in France. On the trains, sleeping berths to Cannes
and Nice were booked up months ahead of time.
But popular satisfaction with the winning of the war subsided
somewhat as the winter drew on. A reaction of mild doubt set in:
Is this the Peace we were promised? Are these the homes fit for
heroes? Will Germany really be made to pay?
The Bystander of October 1919 printed an account of a holiday-
maker returning to a chaotic London war rations, dim lights, high
prices, and strikes. There had been a nine-day railway stoppage,
which the newspapers had treated as if it had been the threatened
Revolution, urging patriotic citizens to volunteer as amateur train-
drivers, and using such war-time terms as doing one s bit , and see
ing it through . The strike was finally settled by granting the rail-
waymen a sliding scale of pay, which was to vary according to the
official cost-of-living index figure. There had also been a police
strike, which greatly alarmed the Law-and-Order party; if even the
police proved unreliable, what was left to stem the tide of revolt?
The Spectator in an August issue denounced this police strike: An
ugly feature was the secrecy with which it had been planned for
the eve of the holidays. Had the Union order been obeyed, great
cities would all have shared the fate of Liverpool, where the mob
REVOLUTION AVERTED, 1919 25
had command of the central shopping district and looted and
destroyed property to the value of 200,000 before it was dispersed
by rifle-fire. It is to be noted, also, that the Daily Herald, the organ
of the extreme Socialist faction, allowed itself to be used for pur
poses of announcing the mutiny and grossly exaggerated the number
of policemen who deserted/
The words mutiny and deserted were used to identify the
Government more securely with the nation. That the police were
ex-servicemen almost to a man, and that they had won great popu
lar sympathy for their strike, was suppressed.
CHAPTER THREE
Women
The B.E.F. were unfortunate in being quartered during the war
among the gens du Nord, who were a byword in France for their
grasping ways; this had soured them a little, but British comrade
ship with France was still by no means fiction. Suspicions of the
United States were far stronger. To begin with, American partici
pation in the war, though officially welcomed, had never touched
the British heart; and the Americans were accused of exaggerating
their eleventh-hour services in France at the expense of those who
had borne the heat and burden of the day. Certainly in a huge Vic
tory Anthology of poems, written by excited American civilians,
though the French and Foch as Generalissimo Focus of Freedom:
Foch! were given occasional bouquets, there was hardly a men
tion of their British allies, and the minor engagements in which the
American army took part became Austerlitzes and Waterloos. In
the United States it was also currently believed that Britain had
been prostrated by her war effort and would never again recover
her former proud position. She was described as a mangy lion lick
ing her sores, and it was confidently prophesied that before long
England would be a pastoral country without dependencies and
with much the same political significance as Denmark, Americans
would then visit it in much the same spirit as the Romans of the
early Empire went to the ancestral ruins of Troy, Britain s effete-
ness seemed to be borne out in the next few years by her inability in
the realms of sport tennis, boxing, golf, yachting, athletics to
make any sort of showing against Americans.
This American attitude was much resented by the British. There
was general disgust too with the way in which Americans, enriched
by the woes of Europe, were buying up books and art treasures-
it seemed with more acquisitiveness than real taste. 175,000 was
26
WOMEN 27
paid for the Duke of Westminster s Blue Boy by Gainsborough,
and the Christie-Miller Library, most of which went to America,
fetched 500,000. They even bought up ancient mansions, such as
Great Lodge in Essex and Agecrof t Hall in Lancashire, and trans
ported them for re-erection, stone by stone, in the States. They
engrossed the grouse shooting in Scotland, being ready to pay up to
7,000 for three months as late as 1925 750,000 went north in
this way. Good American money was heartily cursed by the New
Poor especially by those with nothing to sell in exchange for it.
Pussyfootism was another American trait that did not please. The
American women s clubs, a powerful organization with no British
counterpart, had taken advantage of the earnest war-time mood to
impose teetotalism on the United States. This excited British deri
sion and Pussyfoot Johnson, who came to England to preach the
cause, was so roughly handled by undergraduates that he lost the
sight of an eye. Pussyfoot became a general term of reproach for
all milk-and-water idealists.
The problem of the immense war-debts owed by Britain to the
U.S.A. had not yet become acute enough to embitter feelings still
more between the two countries. But the United States Govern
ment was criticized in Great Britain for baulking its responsibilities
in Europe , and much sympathy was felt for Woodrow Wilson, the
Democratic President: he had been persuaded or (the Americans
said) bulldozed by Lloyd George and Tiger Clemenceau of
France into signing their draft of the Versailles Treaty, which was
not at all in keeping with his own liberal views. The United States
Senate, like most individual Americans, considered the terms over- /
severe, and likely to involve them in costly entanglements. Why,
they were even expected to undertake a mandate for Armenia
where the heck was Armenia anyway? in order to keep the Turks
from massacring alleged Christians! The American armies were
withdrawn from the Rhine, and American participation in the
League of Nations was withheld. Punch published a cartoon, Home
from Home , which showed President Wilson sailing back to
Europe, saying: Time I was getting back to a hemisphere where I
am really appreciated/
Yet the British gladly welcomed gay American fashions in dress,
music, dancing and fun, having temporarily lost their own inventive
power. Syncopated music had been denounced as barbarous and
28 WOMEN
blatant in 1912 when it first came to England, despite the magnifi
cent dancing of the Castles; and the more extravagant rag-time
dances had not been socially approved. Rag-time was an adjective
of reproach; a rag-time regiment was a disorderly and untrust
worthy one. But after the war the new fantastic development of
jazz music and the steps that went with it, became, in the con
temporary phrase, all the rage . Cocktails were also accepted,
though they went directly against British upper-class tradition, the
chief ingredients being gin and vermouth. Gin had for two centuries
been considered a very lower-class drink indeed, and vermouth,
like absinthe, was dangerously Parisian. Only wines or fruit cups
had been drunk on social occasions before the war; with whisky
reserved for sporting uses. Punch printed many a joke against cock
tails, but cocktail parties even in 1920 were not yet popular enough
to rouse the anger of clergymen. American slang was still barred as
vulgar. A revue, in which Noel Coward appeared as a youthful
actor, had to have its original title Oh Boy! changed to Oh Joy!
lest it cause offence.
In January 1919 The Bystander reported that there was morn
ing dancing in country houses and town mansions; for the newest
jazzes and the latest rags had to be learnt without delay. But it did
seem a little odd that a negro jazz-band could earn more in a season
than the Prime Minister did in the course of a whole year. The
Daily Mail in February described This Jazz Age : People are danc
ing as they have never danced before, in a happy rebound from the
austerities of war. . . . But the dancing is not quite as it was in the
dim old years before 1914. The "Tango", "Maxixe" and "Boston"
have gone with the "Turkey Trot" and "Bunny Hug". . . . The
"Baleta" and "Maxina" are revivals of these under new names, and
it is even said that the "Lancers" is being privately practised, so that
the programme will no longer be limited to the "Fox-trot", "One-
step" and "Hesitation-waltz". . . . Dancing without gloves has
become the mode, because the cost of gloves has risen to impossible
figures, and smoking was never so common when sitting out.
There were plenty of Americans about to show how these
dances should be properly performed. The influx into Europe of
wealthy tourists from the States began as soon as the Armistice was
signed. Most Americans spent the greater part of their stay in France
the American predilection for things French having continued
WOMEN 29
ever since the Revolution as a sign of their complete independence
of Britain or in touring Italy; but a visit to Britain was almost
always included in the itinerary. They brought unfamiliar fashions
along, among them lipstick, rouge, eyebrow and eyelash colouring.
Hitherto unashamed use of facial pigment in Britain had not gone
very far along the usual course that daring female fashions had
always taken white silk stockings, by the way, had just accom
plished the run and even with American encouragement it did not
reach its goal for another ten years. The course was: from brothel
to stage, then on to Bohemia, to Society, to Society s maids, to the
mill-girl, and lastly to the suburban woman. Openly attended
beauty-parlours , rare even in America at this time, were unknown -
in Britain. But face cream and powder were already used, and fast
young women powdered their noses in public. American example
also persuaded the ordinary Englishwoman to give up permanently
her old-fashioned stiff whale-bone corsets that she had been forced
to wear even as a schoolgirl of thirteen. (Women war-workers had
already abandoned theirs.) As an American girl observed in Lon
don: Men won t dance with you if you re all laced up. The new/
dances certainly demanded a freedom of movement which was not
possible in old-fashioned corsets. American chewing-gum was now
sold in the streets as a novelty, and given full-page advertisements
in the newspapers; but never became fashionable, except among
schoolboys as a permissible alternative to smoking.
Women in the United States were famous for enjoying far less
social restraint than Englishwomen. This characteristic had first
been noted during the American War of Independence, when the
women had carried on in the absence of their men-folk in the army;
in the Civil War they had done the same again. The Great War
similarly freed the Englishwoman.
Short hair and short skirts were the outward sign of This Free-x-
dom (the theme and title of a best-selling novel by the most pop
ular novelist of the day, A. S. M. Hutchinson, author of If Winter
Comes) . Short hair had been introduced into London just before
the war by the crop-haired crew at the Slade Art School; they got
it from Paris. It was then gratefully adopted by women land-
workers, who had to get up at unearthly hours to milk cows and
had no time for the toilet that long hair entailed. Munition workers/
followed suit. The use of short skirts, which had already been
30 WOMEN
adopted in tennis, was widely extended during the war; the saving
of material recommending it as a national economy. But a skirt wa^s
then considered short if it came well above the ankle: the swell of
the calf was still hidden. Women land-workers wore gaiters,
breeches and overalls, which for a while excited surprise and disgust
among the country people: but they were encouraged by Lee
White s song Good-bye, Madam Fashion, Come again some day ,
in which it was asserted that:
Dainty skirts and delicate blouses
Aren t much use for pigs and cows-es.
The solution was overalls and trousiz . But when Madam Fashion
came back she did not remove the trousers from the many women
who still continued to work on the land, mostly as smallholders.
And before long she popularized trousers for women that were
indistinguishable, except in the matter of fly-buttons, from men s.
This was in revenge for her pre-war rebuff in the matter of the
split skirt, which had been laughed out of existence with the phrase
Not in these Trousiz . The phrase, which came from a song in
which a young man refuses to take his girl to the races so dressed,
had even displaced Archibald, Certainly Not as a complete general
negative.
Women s fashions in 1919 were already setting the standard to
which they adhered throughout the Twenties. Men s dress had not
yet noticeably changed narrow trousers, high-buttoning jackets
and stiff collars were still universally worn, though the hard black
bowler and the tall silk hat were yielding to the soft coloured Horn-
burg, originally introduced by King Edward VII. (King George
V, by the way, had only two sartorial peculiarities: a taste for
single-breasted jackets and a habit of creasing his trousers down the
sides, like pyjamas, instead of down the front. The first caught on,
but not the second.) There was no sign that the short skirt would
ever be abandoned, though one s legs got very cold in winter time,
especially when woollen stockings went out of fashion. Stockings
were of all colours now, black ones tending to disappear altogether,
and white giving place to flesh colour. The rayon industry was in
its infancy and stockings were still mostly of wool or cotton: only
well-dressed women wore $ilk, and even the upper half of their
WOMEN 31
stockings was often of cotton or wool. High heels, which had
hitherto always been associated with the Stage, Paris, and Immo
rality, now came into more general use: though elder women could
not accustom themselves to them and the medical profession con
demned them as causing uteral displacement and being a threat to
the birth-rate. The tubular look of women in the 1920 fashion plates
was completed by the new sack-like blouses and jumpers. The
Sunday Express protested that the cut of many of these was so
startlingly low as surely not to be welcomed in ordinary business
offices ; though the flat-chested fashion considerably lessened the
allure.
The Bystander in March 1919 began a long series of jokes about
the scantiness of women s dresses with the remark that, though
evening gowns were once more permissible, it seemed as if there
was a conspiracy among women to leave as much of the spinal
column uncovered as was compatible with a scanty bodice the
age should be called The Dorsal Period . During the Peace celebra
tions, which began in May and were described as a Jazz Season,
shorter and shorter skirts were worn, all very gay. Sleeves, too,
were shorter, receding now far above the elbows. Hats were in
clined to floppiness, for the well-known cloche or extinguisher
shape had scarcely yet come in. The cloche-hat was designed for
short hair, and in 1919, despite thousands of bobbed heads, long
hair was still the prevailing fashion. Newspapers advertised means
of preserving women s crowning glory , and the International
Hairdressers Competition of 1920 was won by an elaborate, monu
mental pile, surmounted by a large Spanish comb. But short hair
had become so fixed a symbol of female independence that pig-
tailed school-girls, who had once looked forward ecstatically to
the day when they would put their hair up, now felt an equal long
ing for the day when they would cut it off.
The free mixing of men and women was commemorated in the
woollen jumper hitherto only worn by sailors and little boys, who
called it a jersey. Most women in 1919 were wearing jumpers,
knitted by themselves as a relief from socks for soldiers ; and soon
afterwards men, too, began to adopt them under the name of pull
over . The pull-over, in the form of a white open-necked sweater *
with club colours, had long been in sports use; but the new garment,
of subfusc colouring and worn by daring young men over a soft-
32 WOMEN
collared shirt, with a coloured tie and no tie-pin, was for more
general wear. It was the first garment that could be used inter
changeably by men and women.
Towards the end of 1919 many new dance clubs and dance
halls were opened. In the newspapers there were columns of adver
tisements for tea dances, practice dances, subscription dances, and
Victory dances. Innumerable young women offered to help Win
the Peace at the many dances held in aid of Ex-Servicemen, Serbian
Relief, Rumanian Relief, etc., by teaching tangoes, fox-trots, hesita
tion-waltzes, one-steps, and the brand-new Kiki-kari, described as
a fascinating variation on the one-step . By the beginning of 1920
jazz had become universal in fact, as a headline put it, the shimmy
was shaking Suburbia . The shimmy or shimmy-shake had, as its
name suggests, begun life in the American sporting-houses . There
were, of course, many protests against these dances even when they
were already accepted by the most refined hostesses. One clergy
man wrote at the end of 1919: if these up-to-date dances, described
as the "latest craze", are within a hundred miles of all I hear about
them, I should say that the morals of a pig-sty would be respectable
in comparison . However, by this time the new waltz (in which one
no longer merely spun round and round but tacked and veered and
trotted) , and the tango, were ever so much more if in Society,
The shameless abandon with which the new free woman danced,
allowing her partner a near-sexual closeness of embrace, her im
modest dress and coiffure and her profane looseness of language,
were by no means the only charges against her. A letter to the
Spectator, in 1919, complained that young women were learning to
frequent public houses. It followed up this complaint with a sugges
tion that was not put into practice until the Thirties: that there
should be soda-fountains, as in America, where non-intoxicating
drinks could be obtained at all hours. Women were also smoking in
public, and this innovation had a mixed reception. It was reported
in the New Statesman that a young lady in a small restaurant had
a cigarette knocked out of her mouth by an irate elderly waiter*
The writer observed that bourgeois restaurants were stricter in pre
serving the old proprieties than more fashionable eating-houses; and
that while women could smoke without exciting interest in the
restaurant-car of a train, it was still improper for them to smoke on
the tops of buses. They tended to smoke Egyptian and Turkish
WOMEN 33
cigarettes. Virginian cigarettes were a little vulgar even for men:
there was a transitional stage in the early Twenties, before the gen
eral adoption of Virginians, when in offering a cigarette-case one
would say, I hope you don t mind: it s only a Virgin or, more
familiarly, Excuse stinkers!
The chattier journals accepted women s new habits without
criticism. According to the Sphere, one realized that a revolution
had taken place in social customs when one saw girls in the
debutante stage not only dispensing with chaperones, but actually
giving dances of their own without even a presiding mamma in the
offing, and issuing invitations in their own names. To some extent
the modern girl was still the popular heroine that she had become
when working on munitions in factories. She was known as the
flapper , yet this was not a term of reproach. Flapper in the Nineties"
had meant a very young prostitute, scarcely past the age of consent,
but the word had improved just before the war to mean any girl in,
her teens with a boyish figure. The craze for the flapper had begun
in Germany (where they called her a backfisch) as a sexual reaction
against the over-fed under-exercised monumental woman, and as a
compromise between pederasty and normal sex. It reached England
about 1912. In the war, the shortage of sugar and butter and the
popularization of hockey and tennis greatly reduced women s
weight; and when they were freed of their tight corsets the popular ,
hour-glass figure gave place to the neatly cylindrical. To the post
war eye, Italian prima donnas and old postcard portraits of Ed
wardian stage favourites had an irresistibly comic look.
Tlapper was now a term for a comradely, sporting, active
young woman, who would ride pillion on the flapper-bracket of a
motor-cycle. It did not become a term of reproach again, with a
connotation of complete irresponsibility, until 1927 when Punch
noted: Tlapper is the popular press catchword for an adult woman
worker aged 21 to 30, when it is a question of giving her a vote
under the same conditions as men of the same age/ There was a
British film in 1919 called The Irresistible Flapper ; the heroine was
a high-spirited girl who shocked her old-fashioned parents with her
free behaviour and boyish slimness, yet was in truth a brick . This
flapper went to stay with her married sister, whose secret affair
with a matinee-idol threatened to wreck her life. The flapper took
things into her own hands, impersonated her sister, made love to the
34 WOMEN
matinee-idol and spoilt his schemes. At first she was suspected by
everyone of philandering, but eventually her sister confessed,
thanked her for saving her from disgrace; and all was well.
But the flapper already had many enemies and not only among
Church people. Before the war, it was enough to say of her in the
words of the Dapper Flapper song: She is oh, so tender, Figure so
slender, She loves chocolate creams and me. But now the air of
competence which young women had assumed from doing a man s
job during the war was widely resented by advocates of femi
ninity which included sweet inconsequence, childishness, and sub-
missiveness. Girls were blamed for being cocksure and ill-tempered
and even brazen in their advances to men. The brazenness they had
learned as flag-sellers. By the end of the war there were about as
many flag-days every year as there had been Church holidays in the
Middle Ages. The flags or flowers or other lapel-decorations that
everyone bought, or was expected to buy, when accosted by a
pretty girl in the street, were sold for every conceivable cause
the blind, the limbless, the toothless, and the refugee and Peace
did not end the practice by any means.
The women who only a year or so earlier had been acclaimed as
patriots, giving up easy lives at home to work for their Country in
her hour of need, were now represented as vampires who deprived
men of their rightful jobs. By Trade Union pressure they were
dismissed from engineering, printing, and transport work, though
cheap and efficient workers, and from the factories where they had
worked on munitions. No Unemployment Benefit scheme was
arranged for them. They were expected instead to become domestic
servants, for whom there was an always unsatisfied demand. But
any girl who had earned good wages in factories, and had come to
like the regular hours, the society of other workers, and the strict
but impersonal discipline, was reluctant to put herself under the
personal domination of some old cat who would expect her not
only to work long hours for little money, but show complete sub
servience and dispense with all former friendships or amusements.
The servant shortage remained a problem for years, though in fact
most families that had once kept servants could no longer afford to
do so, and facilities for housewives to run their homes themselves
with a minimum of effort were fast being introduced from the
United States, where the same reluctance for domestic service had
WOMEN 35
always existed. Labour-saving devices in cooking, washing up,
cleaning, laundering, a far wider choice of tinned and bottled fruit,
refrigerators, mass-produced clothes, invisible-mending services: all
these were offered and taken up readily.
Most demobilized young women therefore turned to the obvious
profession of marriage; but women had slightly outnumbered men
in England even before the war killed off one eligible man in every
seven and seriously injured another, so that the problem of the sur
plus woman was much debated. However, women assistants con
tinued to be employed in shops and offices to a far greater extent
than before the war there being no male Trade Union strong
enough to exclude them from these trades and many who had
experience in munition factories got engaged in the new electrical
and wireless industries. There they were paid, on the whole, only
about two-thirds of the wages that male employees received. Among
the middle classes after the war, daughters were expected to take
up business careers, or at least do something. Some, of course,
regarded their business life as an interval between school and mar
riage, and this naturally debarred them from jobs in which con
tinuity of work was of more advantage to the employer than cheap
labour. Doing something often meant pretending to take up music
or art. Music was the harder and sterner profession, so art schools
had a tremendous membership, which did not sensibly decrease
throughout the Peace. By 1939, it was calculated that there were
at least 200,000 self-styled artists in England, of whom the great,
majority were women, but fewer than 200, mostly men, lived
wholly by their art.
More and more women were going to universities. Oxford admit
ted them to full membership in 1919. Though many dons felt that
this would destroy the purely intellectual life of the colleges, the
Bishop of London, at a special service for Oxford women students,
blessed the movement for higher education among women. At the
same time he pointed out that they were all destined to become the
wives of some good man he meant each. (This sort of grammati
cal carelessness, due to thinking in rigid blocks of words rather
than in well-articulated sentences, became more and more common
in public speaking as the years went on. Asquith was the last poli
tician whose speeches could be printed as decent examples of Eng
lish prose.) The Cambridge Senate refused to admit women to
36 WOMEN
university membership, but in 1921 passed Graces which granted
degree titles to women graduates. While the proposal was being
debated the undergraduates behaved with the same archaic ungal-
lantry towards the women s colleges that hecklers had shown at
pre-war Suffragette meetings. Oxford was virtuously shocked.
The Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act of 1919 admitted
women to many professions, including the Bar. The first woman
barrister was called to the Bar in 1921, and in the following year
thirty more were called. The newspapers concentrated public inter
est on cases conducted by our new Portias , much to the embar
rassment of the more sedate judges. These were also embarrassed
by women- jurymen, provided for by an Act of 1918: when the
case happened to be one in which violence, especially sexual vio
lence, or any distressing pathological incident figured, and a woman-
juryman was in the box, a judge would cough warningly. If the
cough failed to rouse her sense of modesty, he would suggest that
she should retire. She usually did retire more out of pity at his
embarrassment than out of real squeamishness. But The Common
Cause, the organ of the combined societies for the freedom of
women, constantly protested that women jurors should stick it out,
especially where men jurors would be likely to mitigate the sever
ity due for criminal assault upon children. The Votes for
Women! cry now gave place to that of Equal Pay for Equal
Work! But the industrial magnates and the Trade Union leaders
proved to have harder hearts than the politicians: and the discrimi
nation against women continued throughout the period. Even the
solitary woman who remained a departmental head at the B.B.G
was paid at a lower rate than her male colleagues*
The first woman to sit in Parliament was the busy, American-
born Prohibitionist and Christian Scientist, Lady Astor, who was
returned in 1919 for the Sutton division of Plymouth, at a by-elec
tion caused by Lord Astor s elevation to the peerage. She was a
Coalition candidate and was ceremoniously introduced to a respect
ful house by Lloyd George and A. J, Balfour. Shortly after her
introduction she was reported to be sitting on a jokt committee
dealing with serious moral issues . It was two years before she was
joined in the House by other women members. In 1921 Mrs. Win-
tringham, the widow of a former Liberal member, was elected for
Louth; and the Conservative Mrs. Hilton Philipson (the popular
WOMEN 37
actress, Mabel Russell), also the widow of a former member, for
Berwick. Mrs. Wintringham was warmly welcomed by the earnest
women s-freedom societies; but Mrs. Philipson was considered a
traitor to their cause, as being submissively pro-male in any ques
tion affecting the relations of the sexes. The number of women
members remained extremely small throughout the period, because
no party would give a woman a safe seat to contest except for such
special reasons as the death of a husband who had occupied it, or
other very strong local interest.
Various fresh measures of emancipation were introduced. The
Chancellor of the Exchequer was persuaded to tax a married
woman s income separately from that of her husband, on the ground
that it was unjust for a woman s right to own property to be
respected by the Commissioners of Inland Revenue if she were
unmarried, but not if she were married. The Chancellor agreed that
it has always been an intolerable anomaly that, so far as taxation is
concerned, it is cheaper to live with a woman not one s wife than
with a woman who is . As a matter of fact, so far as taxation was
concerned, it continued cheaper at certain levels of income, until
the end of the period.
Other legal anomalies were also amended. In 1920 the section of
the Larceny Act was abolished which assumed that a woman living
with her husband could not steal from him. In 1923 the Matrimonial
Causes Act provided that adultery of either spouse should be suffi
cient reason for divorce previously, a woman bringing a petition
had also to prove cruelty or desertion. And in 1925 the Criminal
Justice Act did away with the presumption that a woman who
committed a crime in her husband s presence did so under his coer
cion. Women were thus at last legally recognized as morally re
sponsible persons. Even the Church agreed to this recognition, for
in the report of the Lambeth Conference of 1920 the bishops
stated: The Church must frankly acknowledge that it has under
valued and neglected the gifts of women and has too thanklessly
used their work. They firmly repudiated the argument that women
were ceremonially unclean; and concluded that the ministry would
be strengthened if freer use was made of women s spiritual gifts.
The humblest of Holy Orders the diaconate was thrown open
to them: women could thereafter preach and conduct church serv
ices, but not bestow the Blessing or perform any sacrament.
38 WOMEN
It must not be thought that the consciously free women were
more than a small minority: conservatively feminine women, who
wished things to be as they had always been, were frequent. How
ever, the large betwixt-and-between class soon swung over to the
new fashions in dress and behaviour because of the success that they
obviously had with the marrying sort of men; and the feminine
women had to follow suit for fear of seeming dowdy.
Nor were all fashions, even in dancing and music, American.
To those who still thought the Negro-Jewish-American importa
tions blatant, strident and unlovely, other modern alternatives were
offered. There was Eurythmics, an adaptation of gymnastics to
rhythm. This was a system invented by Jacques Dalcroze of
Geneva before the war; its devotees improvised movements in dif
ferent musical times, their ears, brains and muscles working in close
co-ordination. A demonstration was given in the Queen s Hall
which attracted much attention. Newspapers for a year and more
afterwards published photographs of girls in Greekish costumes,
casting themselves into the air, sometimes in Regent s Park, some
times in Kensington studios. But Eurythmics, which was described
as an expression of time-values in bodily movement and a plastic
realization of music , soon lost its general popularity and became
relegated to advanced girls-schools.
If a more English sort of dancing was wanted, to correspond
with the intensely cultivated Englishness of Georgian Poetry, there
was the revived folk dance. The English Folk Dance Society,
founded by Cecil Sharp a few years before, had made numerous
converts, especially in country villages, where the Elizabethan
morris-dance had become practically extinct. Young men in cricket
flannels and young women in short white skirts jigged about to the
fiddle, or piano, in the long-forgotten steps of Gathering Pease-
cods , Rufty Tufty , Black Nag , Sellenger s Round , and the rest.
Folk dancing enjoyed a great popularity for about ten years, chiefly
under Church patronage; and one or two well-attended conven
tions were held at the Albert Hall. But Tin Pan Alley , the New
York music factory, killed it in the end. For there could be no new
composers of folk dances, and each dance had only one tune, and
there were only a limited number of dances. Even in the country
a constant refreshment of tunes was demanded, as soon as a wireless
WOMEN 39
set was installed in every home. Tunes, like clothes, were now
expected to wear out after very short use.
These folk dancers, and the readers of Georgian Poetry and the
London Mercury, were loosely affiliated with what came to be
known as the Arty-and-Crafty (as distinguished from the merely
Arty) Lot. The Arty-and-Crafty Lot were in turn mingled with
the Back-to-the-Landers . They had small holdings in picturesque
villages; kept chickens and goats; spun, wove and dyed cloth; ran
communal hand-presses; did lino-cuts; bottled fruit and home
made wines; wore peasant dress, sandals, and bright smiles; sere
naded one another in summer evenings with folk songs and Eliza
bethan lutanist love-songs with fiddle accompaniment. The men
usually affected beards, until the sudden craze for Beaver made
them return to the razor. Two or more people walking down a
street would play a twenty-point game of beaver-counting. The
first to cry Beaver at the sight of a beard won a point, but white
beards (known as polar beavers ) and other distinguished sorts had
higher values. When the growing scarcity of beavers ended the
game in 1924 King George, distinguished foreigners, and a few
Chelsea pensioners were for some years almost the only bearded
men left in Great Britain. Beards came in again, chiefly among the
Leftists, in the middle Thirties.
CHAPTER FOUR
Reading Matter
What did people read, besides newspapers, in the period immedi
ately following the war? The low-brow public (low-brow and
high-brow were American terms first popularized in England by
H. G. Wells) read monthly story-magazines and pulp fiction
that is to say, the light amorous and melodramatic sort, printed on
wood-pulp paper, like newspapers, and not intended to last. Most
of these novelettes were written by hacks and sold by the title and
cover-design rather than by the pull of the author s name. But one
name was outstanding Nat Gould, whose numerous racing novel
ettes had all had practically the same plot for the last twenty years
or more: the right horse always won in the end and in spite of
every possible mishap. Gould died in July 1919, but his books con
tinued in favour for ten years longer. William Le Queux turned
out mystery and spy stories with loose and improbable plots, and
such scandalous revelations as Love Affairs of the Kaisefs Sons\
he went on writing until 1927. Sax Rohmer s Chinese romances
were also to the fore: in 1919 his The Golden Scorpion was adver
tised widely as a thrilling shocker . (The terms thriller and
shocker , with the semi-literate type of fiction that they covered,
had been in use since the Eighties an early by-product of mass-
education.) The adventures of Dr. Fu Manchu were soon to be
filmed as a serial, which people flocked to see week after week,
Detective-novel writing was not yet an industry; Sherlock Holmes
had no serious rivals. Indeed, the pre-war gentleman-cracksman,
initiated by Ars&ne Lupin and Raffles, was still a more popular type
than the professional detective. J. S. Fletcher s Middle Temple
Murder, published in April 1919, was an early example of the com
ing fashion in which the amateur detective ran away with the
honours. There was also a growing vogue in pseudo-scientific
40
READING MATTER 4!
fiction, especially for boys: this followed uninventively along the
course set by Jules Verne s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the
Sea, and The Moon Voyage, and H. G. Wells s The War of the
Worlds, The Food of the Gods, and The Island of Dr. Moreau.
But the more modern death-rays, robots, invisible men, and heli
copters also figured in these stories; and such advanced boys maga
zines as the Champion and the Wizard challenged the established
Gem and Magnet, which remained true to old-fashioned themes of
school-bullies and heroes. The school-settings of the Gem and the
Magnet were a romanticized public-school of about 1910, the char
acters never altering their vocabulary or jolly, pugnacious beha
viour; there was no female interest in them. Their chief readers
were secondary schoolboys, errand and shop-boys, and a large
number of elderly, sentimental stamp collectors who had been
reading this sort of fiction for fifty years or more. Frank Richards
(not to be confused with his namesake, the Old Soldier) wrote
Billy Bunter stories for the Magnet for thirty years, never flagging.
The American short story with a whip-crack ending on the
O. Henry model had now been adopted by British magazine
writers, for there had been an O. Henry boom half-way through
the war. American natural-history writers, such as Ernest Thomp
son Seton and Gene Stratton Porter, had already set a fashion in
writing about harmless wild animals in a highly personal way; apd
this fashion persisted. Then along came another American, Edgar
Rice Burroughs, to write pulp melodramas of the jungle. Tarzan
of the Apes was the most popular fictional character among the
low-brow public of the Twenties; though the passionate Sheikh
of Araby, as portrayed by E. M. Hull and her many imitators, ran
him pretty close. Tarzan was a glorified Mowgli, from Kipling s
Jungle Tales, who wrestled with lions and beat upon his breast like
an orang-outang. He was unaware that he was the lost child of a
distinguished explorer and his wife; and when he fell in love with
a girl whom he saved from the fangs of savage beasts, a delicate
scruple prevented him from marrying her. She could not fathom
the reason. Then it came out: "My mother was an ape," he said
simply!
Edgar Rice Burroughs later developed an H. G. Wells theme of
an invasion of the Earth by Martians: his was an expedition to
Mars by Earth-dwellers. His hero married a Martian maiden. The
42 READING MATTER
Times Literary Supplement expressed astonishment at his success
ful discovery and exploitation of The Land of Tosh: it was admir
ably nonsensical stuff. As the Twenties lapsed into the Thirties,
it may here be noted, the low-brow public in Great Britain gradu
ally grew up. The sharpening of its critical sense by slicker cinema-
pictures sharpened its literary judgement too: the annals of the
Land of Tosh no longer carried wide conviction and the mezzo-
brow Book of the Month choice of the dailies became (through
the Twopenny Libraries) the shop-girls 7 reading too or such of
them as did not sweep all modern fiction aside as capitalistic dope .
Even Elinor Glyn s passionate novels then appeared a little gro
tesque, with their tiger-skin and orchid settings; and, aware of the
growing influence of famous book-reviewers on the semi-literate
public, she ceased to send out review-copies of her new books. But
in these early days, though not read by the more discriminating,
Elinor Glyn was the reigning queen of popular love literature and
considered Very hot stuff . P. G. Wodehouse was still rather a low
brow writer. He had not yet perfected his purely humorous style,
but mixed the realistic and sentimental with the farcical in the
manner of Jerome K. Jerome. He had been a writer of public-
school stories before he became a journalist in New York, His
Jeeves and Bertie Wooster were inspired by the American notions
of the English dude and butler; but they were sartorially and
socially irreproachable and his lyrical-ludicrous style, combining
American slickness with English sensibility, eventually made him
the most generally appreciated contemporary writer.
Comforting rather than oppressive religious books were much
read, and works on spiritualism especially Sir Oliver Lodge s
Raymond, or Life After Death, as being written by a distinguished
scientist. Gift verse was immensely popular among the low-brows
an appealing mixture of love-themes, religion and optimism. John
Oxenham (Bees in Amber) sold by the hundred thousand, and Ella
Wheeler Wilcox, an American (Poems of Pleasure, Poems of Pas
sion, etc.), was even more successful Mrs. Wilcox J s work had
begun to appear in Britain during the war in small pocket volumes,
bound in violet or green sude. They had been conventional gifts
from soldiers of the lower middle classes to those they left behind.
The coming of Peace did not immediately end Mrs. Wilcox s popu
larity, but it had long been the fashion to sneer at her, as at Hall
READING MATTER 43
Caine, Marie Corelli, and Charles Garvice. The Daily Mail took a
knock at her in 1919: Early this year Mrs. Ella Wheeler Wilcox
came to London from France, complaining bitterly that she had
not been able to get hot baths there. Evidently the flow of the
lady s verse was not checked by her limited ablutions, for she has
now published a little volume of it called Hello, Boys, which was
mostly written over there , and which exhibits all the qualities that
have gained for her a wide public, especially, I have read and can
well believe, "among society people, many of whom order special
editions in extravagant bindings stamped with their monograms".
They would.
Among higher-brows the boom in poetry had begun in 1915
with Rupert Brooke s death. He had been an aesthete and a Swan
at Cambridge before the war, and his early poems, many of them
purposely intended to shock, had been roughly handled by the
reviewers. When he died of fly-bite in the Mediterranean, before
seeing any actual fighting but after writing some stirring sonnets
about war and death, the Morning Post, which had been his leading
detractor, made a sort of Balder Dead of him. Charles Sorley, a
truer poet, though only twenty years old, wrote in May 1915 with
disgust against the application to poetry of such irrelevant criterions
as the subsequent heroic death in action of the poet. But a soldier-
poet was a new and fascinating phenomenon and when Sorley
himself was killed in action five months later he also was among
the immortals. Rupert Brooke s former comrades in Edward
Marsh s anthology Georgian Poetry Lascelles Abercrombie,
W. H. Davies, Wilfred Gibson, Gordon Bottomley, Walter de la
Mare, and the rest were all for some reason unfit for active service
(they were referred to as Eddie Marsh s spavined crew ). But they
benefited by their association with his illustrious name, and new
soldier poets such as Siegfried Sassoon, W. J. Turner, and Robert
Nichols came into the picture and were included in the subsequent
editions of Georgian Poetry, which was a best-seller.
When the war ended, the sharp contrast, whether expressed or
implied, between the horrors of war and dimly remembered rural
joys, did not long remain topical. Edward Marsh had the good sense
to discontinue his series after a single post-war number, resigning
the care of the poets he had fostered to J. C. Squire, the popular
New Statesman satirist, who founded the London Mercury, a new
44 READING MATTER
literary monthly, in 1919. Like most such magazines in their first
number, the Mercury, which believed in the birth of a lyrical age ,
proclaimed that it would follow no one theory, and represent no
one school. The more intense the troubles of society, Squire wrote
in his editorial, the more uncertain and dark the future, the more
obvious is the necessity for periodicals which hand on the torch of
culture and creative activity. . . . The Mercury will concern
itself with none of those issues which are the field of political con
troversy, save only such the teaching of English, the fostering
of the arts, the preservation of ancient monuments are examples
as impinge directly upon the main sphere of its interests. Thus the
character was already set for the more ephemeral literature of the
Twenties; it was not to deal with the pressing questions of the day,
but with the eternal problems of art . The Mercury lasted almost
to the end of the Peace, though in the Thirties it was practically
on the dole ; it stood for the bland Liberal tradition of English
Literature, which on the one hand had no use for the outworn
literary language still employed by most elder writers, but on the,
other discouraged the avant-garde experimentalists who tried to
popularize Franco-American free verse and Imagism and discov
ered great foreign poets for translation. Making an exception in
the case of the scholarly Arthur Waley s translations from the Chi
nese, the editor wrote: There are those to whom any foreigner,
writing in some mysterious wonderful language, like French, or
Polish, or Spanish-American, is a portent; but we are not among
them.
The Mercury was on the dull side, but the opposition to what
was known as the Squire-archy , which dominated the literary
world for the next five years and which such well-known elder
poets as Thomas Hardy, W. B. Yeats, Hilaire Belloc, Rudyard
Kipling, and Robert Bridges were pleased to acknowledge, was
only feeble. Its self-appointed leaders were Edith, Osbert, and
Sacheverell SitwelL Edith edited an annual anthology Wheels with
futuristic cover designs by Severini; the Mercury dismissed it as
mere fireworks. Among other struggling Literary Bolshies were
T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Wyndham Lewis: the last-named,
who was at once poet, critic, painter, and novelist, had started the
whole avant-garde movement just before the war with his maga
zine Blast. Joyce, who had not yet completed Ulysses, the outstand-
READING MATTER 45
ing period-book of the Twenties, was known chiefly for his charm
ing pre-war Dubliners, on account of which Edward Marsh had
successfully recommended him for a British Civil List pension as
a deserving and indigent writer. Eliot was a young expatriate, poly
math American, working in a bank, and known for a few slight,
bitter vers de societe. He was not yet renowned as a Shakespearean
critic and editor of the learned Criterion, the literary quarterly
which was to break the power of the Mercury before foundering
itself shortly afterwards under the weight of its own guns and
armour.
For established writers the Mercury had great respect. It held
Joseph Conrad, H. G. Wells, and Arnold Bennett to be the three
finest novelists still writing Hardy now wrote only poems and
George Moore was rather unhealthy, though a skilful craftsman.
Good things were to be found in Rose Macaulay and Clemence
Dane; Joseph Hergesheimer s bright American novels struck a new
manner which would have a great effect on subsequent English
fiction. (It is difficult to remember now what enormous respect was
paid to Conrad at this time: a Pole who chose mainly seafaring
themes, and wrote the language of his adoption almost too well.
His Rescue appeared in 1920.) The Mercury, mentioning Yeats,
Masefield, Kipling, and Bridges together as the best living expo
nents of verse (a phrase which conveys the contemporary view of
poetry as a fine art rather than as an embodiment of thought)
remarked that it did not now expect the unexpected from them.
The Mercury was, indeed, against the unexpected.
By far the most important literary periodical at the beginning of
the Peace, and throughout it, was the Times Literary Supplement,
under the unobtrusive editorship of Bruce Richmond. It pursued a
policy of impartiality, on the whole with remarkable success. It
was not a mere appendage to The Times and won its independence
during the short period when Lord Northcliffe took The Times
over from the Walter family. Lord Northcliffe, it was said, con
sented not to axe the T.L.S. only if Richmond could within a
stipulated time raise its circulation to what seemed an impossible
figure; Richmond was given a more or less free hand and he suc
ceeded. His policy was to list every new book as it appeared and
to cover as many as possible, in long, closely printed reviews the
only other paper to attempt this formidable task had been the old-
46 READING MATTER
established Athenaeum and to keep a long list of sober and trust
worthy experts ready to deal with every conceivable subject that
was likely to come up. Reviews in other weekly papers were usually
signed; this had once been favoured as more to the interest of litera
ture than anonymous reviewing, because it prevented secret back
biting and log-rolling. But Richmond kept his reviewers anony
mous, knowing that they would thus be less likely to forget their
commission which was to give some notion of the contents and
quality of the book entrusted to them in the temptation to show
off their own personalities with side-comments on things in general.
In other papers, as the post-war years went on, more and more
reviewers who signed their names tried to make columnists of
themselves, and were not discouraged by their editors.
The Times held an unchallenged position as the best-informed
and most independent journal in England, and was accepted as
gospel. Its typical readers were Government servants and their
families. The lay-out was old-fashioned, such ancient spelling con
ventions as aera , oeconomy , and restiff had only recently been
abandoned, and the title was still printed in Gothic type. The first
three pages, and the last three, were crammed with small advertise
ments. The middle was chiefly occupied with political news in
closely printed columns. Some space was given to books, plays, and
fashions, but not much. Sport had its page, with preferential empha
sis on such social events as the Eton-Harrow cricket match, the
University boat race, the Classic horse-races, but little mention of
professional football and other plebeian sports. When in the Thir
ties The Times became a semi-official journal, the British daily
treated with the greatest confidence abroad was the Liberal Man
chester Guardian. The lay-out of the Morning Post, the typical
readers of which were envisaged as the retired senior officer and
his family (King George V was a typical Morning Post reader),
resembled that of The Times, but its treatment of news was odd
in some ways more radical, in others more reactionary. It was at
times curiously far-sighted in matters of social welfare, yet admit
ted its contributors to express an anti- Jewish bias and accepted with
out question the authenticity of the famous Protocols of Zion, a
supposed international Jewish agreement for the secret domination
of the world after The Times had conclusively proved the docu
ment a forgery. Usually the Morning Post was more die-hard than
READING MATTER 47
the Government: it warmly supported intervention in Russia and
published lurid details of alleged Red massacres. Jews were here
again the villains of the piece. When the Labour Ministry, some
years later, recognized the Soviet Government, the Morning Post
protested more vehemently than any other paper, opened a fund
for the support of the persecuted Russian Church and begged its
readers to subscribe to a petition condemning the Government s
action. Readers responded in large numbers, and for several weeks
whole pages were given over to anti-Soviet extracts from their let
ters. The Mormng Post also took up the cause of General Dyer, who,
in 1919, lost his head during a seditious mass-meeting of unarmed
Indians at Amritsar in the Punjab and allowed his troops to open
fire, killing large numbers of them. General Dyer was retired, but
Morning Post readers of the Shoot- Em-Down brigade rallied to his
support: he was pleased to accept the sum of 26,000 subscribed
by them as a testimonial.
The Daily Telegraph modelled itself on The Times, but was
rather the business-man s paper. It had the largest advertising col
umns of any paper one could boil a pint kettle on a single issue
of it.
It was a sign of gentility to take in at least one of these three
select papers, all of which were Conservative: attempts to found
a Liberal paper on the same solid lines had always failed. Among
the penny papers , which were printed on cheaper paper than the
twopennies and threepennies, and did not carry nearly so many
advertisements, the Liberal Daily News supported Lloyd George
and the Coalition, but, being owned independently of politics by
the Cadbury family, who were Quakers, was often impartial in its
criticism of the Government. The secondary material not news,
but book reviews, theatre and film reviews, fashion and cookery
notes was superior to that of any other paper: as a guide to what
middle-class people were talking about in the early Twenties the
files of the Daily News are unrivalled. The Daily Chronicle, Wee
Free Liberal, was inclined to sensationalism, allotting more space to
murders and divorces. The Conservative Daily Express at the end
of the war was a poor thing; but an enterprising Canadian, Lord
Beaverbrook, had just saved it from failure by acquiring a control
ling interest in it for a paltry 17,500. In 1918 its circulation was
only 350,000, not much greater than the expensive and advertise-
48 READING MATTER
ment-rich Daily Telegraph. In 1920 it had risen to half a million
and by 1922 was approaching one million. This increase was due
to an imitation and enlargement of Daily Mail methods, at a time
when the Daily Mail under Lord Northcliffe had achieved the
same ascendancy in the popular Press as The Times enjoyed over
the select Press.
Lord Northcliffe, a hard-working Irishman, was the man who
first gave the public what they wanted by introducing into Eng
land the American Yellow Press methods of journalism, with
which the name of Hearst is inevitably associated. The Daily Mail
had outgrown the reputation for inaccuracy that it had unluckily
won by a premature report of the massacre of the Foreign Lega
tions at Pekin in 1900 and its newsboys no longer hawked it under
the genial nickname of Daily Liar . It was regarded with popular
affection. Lord Northcliffe himself, according to Tom Clarke s
My Northcliffe Diary, defined what he considered to be the func
tion of newspapers and how they should treat the news: News is
surprise an unexpected happening; if a dog bites a man it is not
news, but if a man bites a dog it is news. . . . There are two main
divisions of news: one, actualities; two, talking points. The first is
news in its narrowest and best sense reports of happenings, politi
cal resignations, strikes, crimes, deaths of famous people, wrecks
and railway smashes, weather, storms, sporting results and so on.
The second is getting the topics people are discussing and develop
ing them, or stimulating a topic oneself, such as "The Truth about
the Night Clubs", "Government Waste", "Are our Motor Traffic
Regulations Obsolete?", "Women s Fashion Changes", "The Rid
dle of Spiritualism". . . , There are some who say it is the second
sort of news, these "features" and "talking points", that sells the
newspapers. I do not agree. It is hard news that catches readers.
Features hold them. The wise-crack about man and dog is usually
attributed to Hearst, and hard news is also an American usage
like hard drink for spirits and hard money for specie.
From Lord Northcliffe s list of important features some perma
nent lines of the Daily Mail, and consequently of middle-class
thought, can be construed. The Daily Mail was always on the
look-out for Government waste and delay: two bureaucratic fig
ures with tall top-hats, labelled Dilly and Dally , figured promi
nently in the cartoons signed Toy . It also followed attentively
READING MATTER 49
the progress of new inventions, such as aircraft, motor-boats, and
wireless. Spiritualism, the question of whether religion was decay
ing, the question of what moral attitude to adopt towards bottle-
parties, night-clubs, revues and chorus girls, and all problems
involving women: those were its leading features. Northcliffe,
indeed, advised his editors always to have a woman s story in the
headlines. He had been, even before the war, the first newspaper
owner to abandon the convention that news was only what men
talked about in clubs. He knew it to be also what people talked
about in kitchen, parlour, drawing-room, and over the garden
wall; namely, other people their failures and successes, their joys
and sorrows, their money and their food, their peccadilloes. The
Daily Mail was thus the first to cater for women readers, and for
children too Folkard s Teddy Tail was the first children s fea
ture in the popular Press. This technique was soon adopted and
extended by other newspapers. Northcliffe, however, was against
sensationalism for its own sake. His advice was: Be bright, but
dignified. . . . People who genuinely mistake brightness for sen
sationalism are to be pitied.
The process of brightening the news had not yet been taken
very far. The Daily Mail in 1920 was less sensational than the Daily
Telegraph became fifteen years later. The news was closely and
badly printed; headlines were in comparatively small type, and
had not achieved the compressed, suggestive qualities of the Ameri
can tabloids. Crime was not dwelt on at such loving length as in
the popular Sunday papers.
It would be a mistake to think of the Daily Mail, or any other
popular newspaper of those years, as intended for the working class
as such to read. The only paper of that sort was the Socialist
Herald, founded in 1911, which was a weekly during the war, but
reappeared as a daily immediately afterwards with George Lans-
bury as Editor. It was more clumsily written than most of its
contemporaries, because it could not afford to pay high salaries
to the best available journalists. It contained fewer features, had
a sneering underdog tone, and gave the purely Labour view of any
news-item to a circulation of only 100,000. Its position in the
early Twenties was similar to that of the Daily Worker in the
middle Thirties, except that, whereas the Daily Herald appealed
almost solely to the Socialist working class, the Daily Worker s
50 READING MATTER
public always included a large number of Left Wing intellectuals.
There were very few of these in the Twenties. Any middle-class
person subscribing to the Daily Herald was suspected and shunned
by his neighbours; though the London clubs usually had a copy
on their files for information the Daily Herald printed a good deal
of news that other papers would not touch.
It was to the middle and lower-middle classes that the Daily
Mail appealed. Following up his assumption that the things people
talked about were news, and that they talked most about per
sonages and personalities, Northcliffe advised: c Get more names in
the paper the more aristocratic the better, if there is a news story
round them. . . . Everyone likes reading about people in better
circumstances than his or her own. . . . Write and seek news with
at least the 1,000 a year man in mind.
Northcliffe was famous for his dodges (by this time called
stunts ) even before the war: for a bet, it is said, he had under
taken to change the daily food of the nation within six months, and
did indeed persuade practically everyone to abandon bleached
white bread, temporarily, in favour of Standard Bread. This was a
whole-meal loaf of an unappetizing grey colour that was said to
contain both the germ of the wheat and the semolina . The mon
ster Daily Mail sweet-pea competition had also been a great success
and the prize bloom, entered by a clergyman, was much admired.
Then there were prizes for Aerial Flights, and the Paper Bag Cook
ery Campaign. The war had interrupted these enterprises, but in
the summer of 1920 the Daily Mail ran a sand-competition for
children: 1,000 was offered in prizes for whoever could make the
best sand-design advertising the Daily Mail, on the seashore. The
Boy Scouts Jamboree of that year was also heavily featured in
order to attract the juvenile reader. Northcliffe even occasionally
attempted a political stunt that took him beyond his usual position
on the left wing of the Conservative Party. For instance, in Janu
ary 1920 there was a strike of clerks in the Pearl Insurance Com
pany; they were asking for minimum-wage regulations. North
cliffe supported them, hoping thereby to gain the confidence of
the black-coated Labour movement. When the Pearl Insurance
Company sent him an advertisement, he refused to publish it while
the clerks demands were unsatisfied. Instead, he gave 500 out of
his own pocket to the strikers fund.
READING MATTER 51
The Daily Mail hat, a compromise between the bowler and the
Homburg, was launched in December 1920, and described as the
perfect headgear for every man. One or two M.P.s were per
suaded to wear it, and so was ex-King Manoel of Portugal, whose
name was never difficult to obtain for advertising purposes. A model
was sent to Winston Churchill, famous for his catholicity in hats,
but he was never seen wearing it in public. In fact, this was one of
the few Daily Mail stunts that failed even the staff of the paper,
except very lowly members who hoped to catch the Chief s eye,
could not be persuaded to adopt it for everyday use.
The Daily Mail was laughed at, usually pleasantly, sometimes
unpleasantly, and taken with little seriousness; but people were
always interested to know what in the world it would take up next.
It was this popular confidence that enabled it to spend a great deal
of money in financing its stunts and become the public clearing
house of every amusing nothing of the day . Northcliife died in
1922 and his brother Lord Rothermere succeeded him. Lord Roth-
ermere did not keep the stunts going so assiduously as did Lord
Northcliffe. One odd cause in which he tried to interest the Daily
Mail readers was the injustice done to Hungary at Versailles, when
Transylvania and several districts which had never formed part of
that principality were ceded to Rumania. He urged that the treaties
be revised. The Daily Mail public was puzzled it did not know
Transylvania from Pennsylvania and a rumour went around that
Lord Rothermere was angling for the Hungarian throne.
Shortly after the war ended, Sir Max Pemberton founded the
London School of Journalism, first of the big correspondence
courses that flooded an ever-growing free-lance market with writ
ers of short stories, articles, and news-features. Thousands took the
course but few succeeded in earning anything approaching the
fabulous spare-time incomes that were promised in the prospec
tuses of the many schools to anyone with a knowledge of English
grammar and a little diligence. The advertisements were weighted
with the testimonials of former pupils, most of whom, after paying
for the whole course out of earnings resulting from the first lesson ,
claimed to have gone on to earn between f 10 and 20 per week
entirely in their spare time. These schools of journalism were not a
racket , for they did teach their pupils certain journalistic formali
ties which had to be observed if they were to get anything pub-
52 READING MATTER
lished at all. By the middle Twenties the boom in writing was well
started, and it became the ambition of hundreds of young men and
women to go into a publisher s or to go into Fleet Street . The
cachet of a literary calling was cried up not only by the schools of
journalism and by foundering publishers who were glad to take in
rich apprentices , but also by large numbers of experienced but
unsuccessful journalists who took personal classes of private pupils.
A feature of post-war newspapers was the increased space given
to gossip; of which, however, Lord Northcliffe at first disapproved
on the grounds that it was bad news-writing. News of what Soci
ety was doing, he felt, should be given without the snobbish per
sonal touch of I met Lady G, who was wearing . . . or Lord K.
told me ... his brother-in-law the Hon. P. C. is a well-known
. . . etc. But this was before the penetration of higher journalism
into the elder universities, which became the training ground for
many of the best correspondents and brightest feature-writers of
the day. The recruits that newspapers needed were no longer
drudges trained from the age of fourteen in a newspaper office, but
university men with a superficial knowledge of many things, full
of ideas , and with a snappy way of expressing them. These Oxford
and Cambridge could provide but especially Oxford. Charles
Graves, Beverley Nichols, Margaret Lane, Peterborough , and
William Hickey all began their journalistic careers at Oxford.
Even members of the aristocracy were induced to become
gossip-writers and boldly sign their names instead of using pseudo
nyms. Lord Castlerosse first began to write The Londoner s Log
for the Sunday Express in 1926; but the gossip-writer was by now
a columnist and provided a critical and authoritative commentary
on life in general rather than humble gossip about the private life
of his social betters. Shortly afterwards, Lady Eleanor Smith (Lord
Birkenhead s daughter) began to write for the Weekly Dispatch,
but soon retired from her Window in Vanity Fair , preferring to
write novels exploiting her passion for gipsies. Then another Irish
peer, Lord Donegall, was engaged by the Sunday News. Towards
the end of the Twenties The Times, which employed no columnist,
sponsored an agitation against the practice of columnism; letters
appeared signed by London Hostess , deploring this new and dan
gerous tendency in social life , and condemning the sneak-guest
as an unprincipled cad. But the columnist could not be suppressed.
READING MATTER 53
He was the most feared and courted member of Society and was
welcomed by head-waiters, masters of ceremonies, seaside mayors,
golf -club secretaries and the like as if he were visiting royalty. The
best known columnists by the end of the Peace were, like their
American counterparts, earning far more than the managing editors
of the papers for which they wrote and this did not include the
perquisites of their envied office.
CHAPTER FIVE
Post- War Politics
In spite of the Bolshevik bogey that they manipulated, it was cor
rectly assumed by the newspapers that the country was sound at
heart . The elder members of the working class for the most part
resented the identification of their Trade Unions with Socialism.
They favoured one or other of the two elder parties, and continued
in their traditional loyalty to the Crown and the Peerage, and their
unabashed respect for the Squire or Owner. They knew their
place . The younger members were Socialistically inclined, but
even the few who had picked up the Marxian catchwords had no
real ambition to overthrow and displace the Capitalist class. A more
usual ambition was to rise into the substantial grade above the
artisan, by becoming a foreman or skilled technician, and so rank
socially with clerks and independent tradesmen. Foremen, clerks,
and small tradesmen similarly wished to rise from the black-coated
class into the middle class of manufacturers and wholesale mer
chants. It was for such ambitions that the highly popular Pel-
manism was designed, which advertised in every newspaper and
periodical of the time. This was a method of memory training, and
its argument was that human energy and will-power could be sys
tematically developed: each person could make the most of his
natural gifts by intensive training. Pelmanism set out to train people
how to practise self -analysis and self-drill, in order to eliminate
mind-wandering and promote concentration. The headlines of its
advertisements were: How to overcome brain-fag , How to origi
nate ideas , Self-expression develops ability , The hygiene of
study , etc. It was a simple commercial version of the work which
psychologists were then doing in fact, the first form in which
psychology reached the wider public. Instead of undertaking to
correct unfortunate aberrations in character, as the psycho-
54
POST-WAR POLITICS 55
therapists did, it emphasized the success side of living. Everyone
had abilities, and all that anyone needed was training in order to
get to the top of the ladder. There is plenty of room at the top
was the catchword. Once the revolutionary crowd-spirit had thus
been canalized into a million streams of individual ambition, the
representatives of Law and Order could be easy at heart; and the
more pleasantly they lived, the greater the incentive of those below
to rise socially and enjoy the same honour and security.
The simple annals of the unambitious poor were simple indeed
in these days: few could afford to get drunk and street-fighting
therefore declined, there was as yet no B.B.C., religion had lost
both its terrors and its consolations. The men s chief interest was
betting on horse-races (most of them seldom or never saw a race
horse), watching professional football, and cultivating their allot
ments. The women had the traditional women s interests of chil
dren, the household, and making ends meet; and the new weekly
cinema-going habit was sufficient entertainment. If in the lower
and lower-middle classes some movement or novelty of an inter
esting kind had occurred, it would surely not have escaped some
Daily Mail reporter s keen eye for news. But they were too closely
occupied now with the struggle for existence to produce any news
worthy item except an occasional crime of violence. It was this,
rather than the snobbery imputed by the Daily Herald, that kept
them out of the news at the expense of Society , one of whose main
functions had come to be providing active topicality.
What was Society now? The former ruling class , whose sons
had gone into Parliament and the services as a matter of course,
was now forced more and more into business; because of increased
taxation, the rise in the cost of living, and the reduction of Army
and Navy establishments. The old upper-middle classes with fixed
incomes of about 5,000 a year were obliged to cut down their
social expenditure. Their town mansions were converted into flats, /
and their political power lived on only in so far as they became
influential in business. Politics and business were thus becoming
openly the occupation of the same class. The aristocracy, for the
most part, lived a quiet life, trying hard to preserve what it could
of its old estates. Society had ceased to have any strict meaning.
Already in Edwardian times this process had gone fair, the King
himself having admitted the Jewish plutocracy, leading actresses,
56 POST-WAR POLITICS
and such self-made merchants as Sir Thomas Lipton, to his intimate
acquaintance. But whereas, in Edwardian times, poverty and
divorce were failings equally fatal to social ambition, by the Twen
ties the light-hearted American view of divorce, as rather a joke
than a misfortune, had come into fashion, and The New Poor
positively boasted of their penuriousness. No surprise was caused
when Mayfair women opened dress-shops in Bond Street, or started
Social Bureaux for supplying guides to American visitors. Society ,
it was generally assumed, had to earn its living like any other class;
so Society came to mean people worthy of a columnist s respect
ful mention . As the period advanced the Mayfair accent changed
remarkably from an over-sweet rather French lisp to a rasping tone
that had traces in it of Cockney, American, and Midland provincial.
Times were felt to be hard: everyone who counted was to some
v extent the victim of the disgusting war-profiteer, and it now began
to be realized that there could be peace-profiteers as well. In Janu
ary 1920 The Tatler remarked that perfectly hair-raising stories
were going about of the huge and horrible fortunes made by profi
teers out of a war-worn people . Prices of even the simplest neces
sities had got beyond the joke-stage, and people were beginning to
ask themselves why. Life was in such a whirl of confusion, how
ever, that few paused for an answer. The Tatler, after raising the
question, went on to complain hotly that hundreds of thousands of
pounds were being collected to feed Hun babies , and that railway
porters were earning 3 a week, while British ex-officers were walk
ing the streets, looking for jobs. The moneyless ex-officer was a
new social phenomenon in England. For, whatever one s birth or
antecedents, a commission automatically made one a gentleman
as did a degree at an elder university or Holy Orders in the Angli
can Church. Before the war, gentlemen without money were usu
ally soon found in ditches with sporting rifles beside them; or were
exported by their wealthy connections to distant parts of the
Empire. But, towards the end of the war, commissions had been
granted to men (known as temporary gentlemen ) who had greater
military talent than claims to gentility. After the war they were
entitled to keep honorary military rank, but if they happened to
become beggars with no rich relatives to support or export them
did not feel the dignified necessity of suicide.
In October 1919, when the war-time bread subsidy was removed,
POST-WAR POLITICS 57
the price of a quartern loaf rose from 9%d. to is. 40!.; it did not
fall again to normal until 1922. Milk, in the winter of 1920-1, rose
to i id. a quart, and did not come down to the normal jd. until
April and this was ordinary milk, left at the doorstep in unsealed
cans, for the practice of grading and bottling had not yet begun.
It was the same with most other commodities. The sudden rise in
prices to levels not even reached during the war was caused by the
rapid reduction in unemployment and by a consequent sharp
advance in wages. It was essentially a price-boom, rather than a
boom in industrial production. People were now willing to pay for
a great number of goods and services which for the last five years
they had been unable to get. Demand was so great and so sudden
that the resulting shortage induced a sharp rise in prices, which in
turn induced a feverish attempt to re-equip industries not always
wisely. The cotton industry of Lancashire, for instance, was
re-eqtiipped at such expense, in the hope of a permanently large
demand for its goods, that it was crippled for the next twenty
years.
Even during this short-lived boom there were constant com-^
plaints against the Lloyd George Government. It was remembered
that England was supposed to be a democratic country; and busi
ness men felt that war-time authoritative habits of government
ought to be relinquished as soon as possible, and private enterprise
given its head once more. In spite of the disorganization of the rail
ways, caused by war-time wear and tear and the transfer to France
of railway equipment, wide dismay was caused by the Govern
ment s proposal to create a Ministry of Ways and Communica
tions. The Ministry was to enjoy almost unlimited control over
roads, railways, canals, harbours and docks, with the power to
acquire any means or instrument of transport by simple Order in
Council. Such far-reaching authority was held justifiable only in/
time of war; and Lloyd George was remembered by Conservative
back-benchers as the pre-war introducer of the atrocious Land
Tax, the meddling National Health Insurance, and other Liberal
legislation which logically could only end in State Socialism and
the nationalization of mines and industry in general.
It was also feared that the Ministry would spend too much money
in helping the railways to rehabilitate themselves when it was
already clear that lorries, buses and cars were reliable, economical
58 POST-WAR POLITICS
and more direct means of transport. The future of British indus
try , the Press agreed, lies on the roads. Lord Montagu, a pioneer
of the sport of motoring, wrote to The Times in January 1919 to
praise the smooth running of motor transport behind the lines in
France during the war, and to suggest that the War Office should
lend some of its transport experts to help reorganize road traffic at
home. At that time speed-limits and traffic regulations were by no
means uniform in England.
The motor manufacturers joined in the outcry against the Gov
ernment: they held that there had been unnecessary delay in trans
forming the productive capacity of the country to meet peace
time needs. They now had neither enough factories nor enough
material to cope with the number of orders received. American
competition could therefore not be met, and they were indignant
that the Government should have imposed a duty of only 3 3 % per
cent on the importation of foreign cars. Great Britain seemed an
almost virgin market for cars to the American exporter: in the
United States in 1921 one person in every fourteen was a car
owner, but in Great Britain only one in every one hundred and
sixty-eight.
Although most manufacturers were working energetically,
despite the extraordinarily high prices of labour and materials, to
restart their industries, there were numerous prophets of disaster.
These pointed out the dangers of an unfavourable balance of trade,
caused by the enormous increase of imports in 1919 and to the
comparatively slow growth of exports; and spoke of the Vicious
spiral of high prices and high wages, followed by higher prices
and higher wages. The Labour Party was attacked in the Conserva
tive Press for lending a too-ready ear to unscrupulous opportu
nists , who wished to dislocate public services and hamper private
enterprise by causing unnecessary strikes; but the Government was
at the same time accused of wilfully prolonging the rate of public
expenditure which had been necessary during the war, and of
launching out into its housing, land and road schemes in an orgy
of extravagant finance .
The break of this industrial boom came in 192 1, when industries
were beginning to work normally again and the first peace-time
reaction of extravagant spending had died down. A trade depres
sion was revealed in the growing unemployment-rate and in the
POST-WAR POLITICS 59
frequent strikes. The ex-Serviceman who lost his temporary
employment was no longer a hero but a good-for-nothing living
on public charity. The Government began to divest itself of
embarrassing responsibilities. There was much talk of retrench-
ment , and of wielding the axe . It was the task of Sir Eric Geddes,^
then Minister of Transport and a former railway manager, to
wield this axe, and he and it figured prominently in cartoons and
newspaper comments of the time. The projects of the National
Industrial Conference were abandoned. The Government became
more cautious in its housing schemes and gave up its war-time con
trol of the railways, having kept it only long enough to assist in
the grouping of the various lines into four large systems: L.M.S.,
L.N.E.R., G.W.R., and Southern.
Government control of the coal industry during the war had
worked fairly smoothly, and in 1918 the miners had demanded
nationalization of the mines. The commission appointed in 1919,
under the chairmanship of Mr. Justice Sankey, to enquire into
the coal industry, actually endorsed this demand and recom
mended the raising of wages. Wages were raised and, after a twelve-
day strike in October 1920, slightly raised again. In March 1921,
however, when it seemed clear that the boom in manufactures was
ending, and that the demand for coal would decrease, Government
control was withdrawn. The mine-owners then wished to revert
to wage-rates that would vary from district to district, on the
ground that some mines were more expensive to run than others
and so could not afford the prevailing high rate. The miners put
forward an alternative scheme: a uniform wage to be paid out of a
national pool of profits, which would enable the poorer districts
to be supported by the richer. The mine-owners could not agree
among themselves to accept this, and on ist April 1921 the miners
came out on strike. The railwaymen and transport workers usu
ally supported the miners in what was known as the Triple Alli
ance, but this time they were restrained by their leaders, J. H.
Thomas and Ernest Bevin. This was April fth and the miners
named it Black Friday. They wisely went back to the pits at the
end of the summer. They knew that the demand for coal was
diminishing for a number of reasons, and would continue to dimin
ish. Many shipping companies were installing oil-burning engines
in their ships. The use of electricity for domestic and industrial
60 POST-WAR POLITICS
purposes was increasing. Railways would need less coal because
of the competition of lorry traffic on the roads. What was worse,
Germany, having no specie, was being made to pay for the war in
kind. Coal exported to fulfil the Allies Reparations demand was
competing with the home industry, and any stoppage by British
mines meant so many customers lost to Germany. The retail price
of coal was slowly falling in 1920 it had been 8os. a ton, and by
1923 it was to be only 508.
The miners had been handicapped by their lack of unanimity
in agreeing on any positive policy: they aimed merely at resisting
change and compelling concessions. Nor could they count on the
support of other unions, each of which was autonomous. None
either desired or had made any preparation for a prolonged indus
trial struggle. The day on which the miners went back to work
and district rates were reintroduced was a gloomy one. To soften
the blow, however, the Government agreed to grant the industry
a yearly subsidy of 10,000,000 to offset the fall of wages in poorer
districts. This subsidy was continued until 1925, when its with
drawal precipitated fresh troubles. The humiliating defeat of the
miners was largely responsible for a nearly two-million drop in
general Trade-Union membership.
The slump of 1921 made it clear that recovery from the effects
of war could not be achieved by the individual action of any one
nation. Britain was dependent upon foreign trade, and to stimulate
such trade the world had first to be set in better order. To begin
with, enormous sums of money were still being spent, and many
lives lost, in garrisoning the conquered Turkish territories of Pales
tine, Transjordania, and Mesopotamia. The popular Press was gird
ing at the Government to clear out and cut its losses: Mesopotamia
and Mess-up-at-home-here were twin anti-Government catch
words. The Press had a powerfully ally in Colonel T, E. Lawrence,
who had been the chief instrument in detaching the Arab inhabi
tants of these countries from their allegiance to the Turks, and who
regarded the imposition of British or French rule over them as not
only economically and militarily unwise but a flagrant breach of
faith to allies. Since he held the key to the situation, so far as the
British side was concerned, the Government capitulated, and asked
him to draft a settlement which the Arabs would accept and which
POST-WAR POLITICS 6l
would safeguard British interests as far as possible. He consented,
and in the name of Winston Churchill a satisfactory arrangement
was made for a gradual withdrawal.
In a draft preface to his Seven Pillars of Wisdom Lawrence
wrote: In 1919 powerful elements in the British Government were
seeking to evade their war-time obligations to the Arabs. That
stage ended in March 1921, when Mr. Winston Churchill took
charge of the Middle East. He set honesty before expedience in
order to fulfil our promises in the letter and in the spirit. He exe
cuted the whole McMahon undertaking (called a treaty by some
who have not seen it) for Palestine, for Trans jordania, and for
Arabia. In Mesopotamia he went far beyond its provisions, giving
to the Arabs more, and reserving for us much less, than Sir Henry
McMahon had thought fit. In the affairs of French Syria he was
not able to interfere, and the Sherif of Mecca can fairly complain
that the settlement there is not yet in accordance with the Anglo-
French agreement of 1916, or with our word to him. I say "not yet"
advisedly, since the McMahon proposals (being based on racial
and economic reasons) were to have imposed themselves eventu
ally, even if Mr. Churchill s progressive British military withdrawal
from Mesopotamia had not come to prejudge the future of all the
Arab areas. . . . England is out of the Arab affair with clean
hands/
By implication the French (who did not decide to cut their
Near Eastern losses until 1936) had dirty hands. Their military
hold on Syria was the real argument against relinquishing British
conquests in the Middle East. And in the Turko-Greek dispute they
backed the winning side, the warlike Turks, while in the interests
of trade the British backed the mercantile Greeks who were
ignominiously thrown out of Smyrna. The Entente was beginning
to crack.
In the interests of trade, too, the British Government helped
the League of Nations to restore the financial stability of Austria
and Hungary. And it was clear that another important preliminary
to general European recovery was the industrial reconstruction of
Germany. But here again the British Government met with oppo^
sition from France. France was largely an agricultural nation and
French industry was not so dependent as British on the prosperity
62, POST-WAR POLITICS
of the rest of Europe. French statesmen were thinking politically
rather than economically. They were resolved to keep Germany
down.
This same divergence of opinion made itself felt in the tangled
Reparations problem. Conference after conference had been called
to settle it; but no agreement could be reached. The French wished
to make reparations and war debts cancel each other, so that Ger
many would be paying France s debts to Britain and to the United
States. They also encouraged their client states to take advantage
of Germany s weakness. For example, Briand, the French Premier,
approved the Polish filibustering expedition into Silesia under Kor-
f anty. But Lloyd George strongly condemned this raid: he did not
wish Germany to become too weak, and considered that she should
pay only for damage done during the war. The price was not to
exceed what experts calculated to be her paying capacity. At the
Genoa Conference of 1922, it was decided that the Allies should
take over control of German finances in order to determine this
capacity but how to control them was a point on which no deci
sion could be reached. In January 1923, with the excuse that the
Germans were wilfully behindhand in their stipulated payments
of coal to France, the French Army occupied the Ruhr territory;
and there tried to foment a Rhineland separatist movement. They
were met with passive resistance by the Germans, who refused to
have any dealings with the Allies until the Ruhr was evacuated.
The British plainly dissociated themselves from the French action.
The origin of the war was now forgotten, the Germans forgiven,
and France openly accused of trying to impose security on Europe
by brute force.
By this time the slump and the international tangle had already
brought about the fall of Lloyd George. He was accused of being
the man who had nearly lost the war and who had effectively lost
the peace. It was said on, the one hand that he had abandoned
Ireland to the Sinn Feiners, and on the other that he was responsible
for the Black and Tan atrocities . In the opinion of the die-hard
Conservatives he had been too lenient with Germany, and in that
of the more liberal-minded he seemed to be yielding to France s
efforts to dominate Europe. He had promised a land fit for heroes,
but all that the country had enjoyed was at first high prices, and
then a slump. He had promised reconstruction, but all that he had
POST-WAR POLITICS 63
done, apparently, was to waste public money on houses, education,
and schemes for roads, which private enterprise could have carried
out more cheaply and efficiently. He was the victim of his own
enthusiastic promises of 1918, and of the public wish to find a
scapegoat for the unpleasant truth that peace did not automatically
bring prosperity.
The Conservative Party, which had not exercised independent
office for sixteen years, saw its opportunity. It was thought safe,
now that the Army and Navy were again wholly prof essionalized v
to dispense with the Liberal buffer that had interposed between
the forces of Law and Order and the war-time revolutionaries. The
country is sound at heart and this meant Conservatized. Bonar
Law, the leader of the party, emerged from retirement and
approved the Conservative withdrawal from the Coalition. Since
the Liberals themselves were sharply divided in allegiance between
Lloyd George and Asquith, the Conservatives now came swim
ming into power. But in May Bonar Law himself resigned, owing
to ill-health. He died in the same year and was buried in Westmin
ster Abbey; as a reward less for his ministerial services than for
having broken, it was hoped for ever, the spells of the Wizard of
Wales .
Stanley Baldwin, who succeeded him, was also little known.
Although he had been Chancellor of the Exchequer for nearly a
year, no-one had been impressed by any obvious qualities of lead
ership in him: indeed, he had earned very bad marks in the Press ,
by his handling of the waijdebts problem. Max Beerbohm expressed
the general astonishment at his elevation by a cartoon which
showed the schoolboy Baldwin looking at the grown-up Baldwin
and exclaiming: Good Lord! You, Prime Minister!
The war-debts problem was briefly this: Britain owed the
United States more than nine hundred million pounds, but was
owed by other countries over two thousand million pounds. At first
Britain and France proposed that all war debts should be cancelled,
but the United States naturally refused to give up their advan
tageous position as the greatest creditor nation. Balf our, the former
Conservative leader, then Lord President of the Council, thereupon
presented the debtor countries with a note writing off their debts
to Britain except for such a sum as would enable her to pay the
United States; thus putting on the Americans the odium of playing
64 POST-WAR POLITICS
the dun in a street of beggars. Some Americans realized that the
Allies could only pay in goods, and that quantities of foreign goods
dumped in the United States would upset domestic economy and
mean stepping up the tariffs on import* 1 still further. The majority,
however, took up the uncompromising attitude that American help
had saved the Allies from losing a bungled war, and that this help
should be paid for; it was not the fault of the United States if the
Allies had bungled the peace too for Congress had refused to
ratify the Versailles Treaty. This combination of moral righteous
ness with what seemed the spirit of usury infuriated the British,
and Baldwin s mission to the United States in 1923, to settle the
war-debt problem, was therefore highly unpopular at home. The
generous Baldwin actually agreed that Britain should pay 33,000,-
ooo annually between 1923 and 1932, and afterwards 38,000,000
annually until 1984; his intention was to maintain Britain s reputa
tion for financial stability. But once the Americans had this settle
ment signed, they allowed far more favourable agreements to other
debtor nations. Throughout the Twenties, the Daily Mail and
Daily Express, whenever they fell out with Baldwin on any point
of policy, never failed to bring up this debt settlement against
him.
A General Election was due in 1923, and Baldwin chose to put
forward a tariff policy, which delighted Big Business, consisting
of a tax on manufactured imports, a preferential rate being allowed
for Empire products. But elsewhere it raised an outcry against the
prospect of dear food though, to the disgust of the farmers,
foreign meat and wheat were exempted from taxation and served
to unite the Asquith and Lloyd George factions of the Liberals.
Baldwin was staggeringly frank even in those days: after the elec
tion he confessed that he would not have risked a tariff policy
had he thought that there was a bed wide enough in the United
Kingdom to hold both Asquith and Lloyd George 7 . But in his elec
tion speeches he made much of being a plain man and an ordinary
person . As such he was cartooned by the Opposition Press: the
rising young Australian-born cartoonist David Low showed him
shrinking into a very plain and ordinary tadpole. The election on
the Liberal side was fought with spirit* Lloyd George referred to
the Tories as tinned crabs and tinned salmon those foods being
supposedly what the public would have to subsist on if tariffs were
POST-WAR POLITICS 65
introduced. The Daily News provided several electioneering songs,
which were actually sung at political meetings. One ran:
No, we won t have Protection,
We won t have Protection to-day.
Twould rush up the prices
And squeeze us like vices
And we d have to pay, pay, pay . . , J
a parody of the American song Tes, We Have No Bananas , which
was then the rage. On the other hand the Liberal main plank, Free
Trade, which had always previously secured them a majority when
ever Tariff Reform came up, was seen to be tenable only while
Britain maintained undisputed mastery of world markets and it
was obvious that this was no longer the case.
The odd result of this election was that neither side won. Bald
win had underestimated the effect of his tariff policy on the Labour
vote. It was not enough for his supporters to drown the No
Bananas melody with Vote, vote, vote for Stanley Baldwin, Roll
old Asquith in the mud . For the slump had given ex-Servicemen^
of the working classes, now on the voting registers, plenty of
leisure for remembering their rebellious war-time moods. If Lloyd
George had failed them, they could have no better hopes from
Bonar Law or Baldwin. They were not Socialists and they hated
Socialistic clap-trap ; but they would punish the two elder parties"
for letting them down. Them Socialists can t make no bigger
bloody box-up nor the old lot didn t , was the current opinion of
the back-streets. Thus, though the Conservatives remained the
largest party in the House of Commons with 258 seats, they were
outnumbered by the combined Liberal and Labour parties together,
who held 158 and 191 respectively. This was the first time in Par
liamentary history that the old sham-fight between the two elder
parties had been disturbed by a third party of such alarming dimen
sions. The Conservatives expected Asquith to do the decent thing:
forget past injuries and keep the Wild Men out by co-operation
with themselves. But Asquith did not want to do anything that
might seem an invitation to a class war; and most of his party agreed
with him that the more sensible course would be to support the
Labour Party, if they would take office, and make them instru
ments of Liberal policy. Labour, of course, would have been
66 POST-WAR POLITICS
politic to refrain from taking office, and instead put the Liberals
into servitude on their behalf; but the temptation was too strong.
Ramsay MacDonald became Premier.
The Liberals were strongly criticized for their decision and
described as the patient oxen dragging Labour through Parlia
ment and fated at the end to be slaughtered by Labour opponents
in by-elections. And it was true that from a party point of view,
Asquith had made a grave tactical mistake. He should have forced
the Conservatives, as the biggest party, to take office and be answer
able to him that they did nothing to injure Liberal interests. In
three-cornered contests thereafter it was decided by property own
ers who had been taught to fear the nationalization under Social
ism, of everything, including women , that a vote for the Liberals
was a vote for Labour. Asquith had been brought up in a Britain
where the word compromise 7 had an attractive ring, and he
intended his to be the compromise party. But as soon as Labour grew
strong enough to challenge Capital, political feeling began to run
so high that compromise had an odious connotation of weakness
and treachery. Except in a few Scottish and Welsh strongholds the
Liberal cause was lost, and the party remained an almost pathetic
minority for the rest of the period.
Disillusion at the fall of a great man, whose war-time popularity
liad rivalled even Lloyd George s, was another reason for the swing-
over to Socialism. This was Horatio Bottomley, the last of the
demagogues. He was of humble origin and educated in an orphan
age. Persistent rumour made him the illegitimate child of Annie
Besant and Bradlaugh the equally famous atheist, whom he strangely
resembled in features. Bottomley was amused by the story and did
not deny it he was, however, the son of a distressed tailor s fore
man. He was a plausible lay-lawyer and had amassed a large for
tune by promoting a number of tricky financial schemes, chiefly
lotteries and monster competitions. These were advertised in his
weekly, John Bull, which specialized in spicy reports of murders
and divorces and in the merciless showing up of vice and graft
and most of the prizes were won by imaginary competitors, or
members of Bottomley s entourage. He was a genial rascal and took
the line that people who were fools enough to be duped by his
swindles deserved all they got. On one occasion a trembling office-
POST-WAR POLITICS 67
boy was hauled up before him by the head clerk, having been
caught red-handed stealing a very small postal-order from a com
petitor s entry to a Bullets competition. Bottomley glared at the
boy for a few moments. Then his features relaxed and he said
apologetically to the head clerk: Well, damn it all, it s only six
pence, I know, but I suppose he has to begin somewhere.
In 1906 he had been elected Independent M.P. for South Hack
ney, a seat that he held for six years until he had to resign because
of bankruptcy. Having extraordinary persuasive powers, he was
able to pose in his John Bull editorials as the champion of the under
dog and the enemy of humbug. The war provided him with his
great opportunity. He proved himself the patriot of patriots and
the ablest recruiting agent in the country. At mass meetings, under
the banner of Tight for King and Country , he was a more popu
lar draw than any Cabinet Minister except Lloyd George himself.
But he did not give his services free: he made 27,000 out of these
recruiting meetings. When a Zeppelin bomb nearly destroyed his
office premises, John Bull made it appear that the Germ-Huns were
trying to assassinate their Horatio because of the will to victory
with which he inspired the Boys in the Trenches. The boys in the
trenches were certainly devoted readers of his cheerful pages. At
the end of the war he was able to apply for his discharge as a bank
rupt, and to resume his seat in Parliament for South Hackney.
He was then launching new prize schemes the Premium Bond
Scheme of 1918, for example, to which his readers subscribed
90,000. Out of this he had agreed to pay 10,000 in prizes; the rest
he paid into his private account. He did not hoard his winnings,
but spent lavishly on champagne (of which he was the largest
drinker in the country), women, and the races. The champagne
led him, in his betting, to a total disregard of the real odds. He
backed his own horse, Aynsley, for 40,000 in the Manchester Cup
of 1919. It lost, but he immediately lodged a protest that the
winning horse, By Jingo, had been wrongly entered the owner s
name was Depledge, and by mistake it had been entered as De
Pledge. His protest was overruled, and the Turf thereafter con
sidered him a very poor sportsman. The House of Commons sim
ilarly took offence when Bottomley, in John Bull, described Lady
Astor, who had been pressing her teetotal convictions on the House
of Commons, as a hypocrite of the first water . On his next appear-
68 POST-WAR POLITICS
ance in the House, Bottomley was greeted with a storm of boos; it
was an unwritten law that members should not make personal
attacks on one another in the Press. Bottomley s nerve was un
shaken: he felt himself secure in the hearts of the greater part of
his countrymen.
Already, however, he was being accused of swindling. A
pamphlet headed Horatio Bottomley Exposed which had been
sold in the streets at intervals since the earliest days of the war, was
damaging him a good deal. Bottomley set in motion his usual pro
cedure for getting out of such difficulties. He asked his friend
Reuben Bigland, a Birmingham printer known in sporting circles
as Telephone Jack , to find some needy fellow-printer who would
undertake for a fee of f 100 to reprint the pamphlet and be success
fully sued for libel. That would prevent the repetition of similar
statements. Everything went according to plan. Bottomley, as
usual, conducted his case in person and gave Greaney, his sham
opponent, such a dressing-down in the witness-box that the jury
awarded him 500 damages which, of course, Greaney did not
Thus triumphantly vindicated, Bottomley launched out on his
Victory Bond Scheme. The Government had issued a Victory
Loan, to which the smallest amount that anyone might subscribe
was 5. Bottomley represented this as unjust to the small investor
and promised that any reader of John Bull who subscribed i would
be given a fifth share in a Government 5 bond. The bonds bought
by these subscriptions were to be handed over to trustees: big prizes
would then be paid out of the accruing interest. Bottomley s inten
tion was perhaps to embezzle only a part of the capital, as he had
done so often before, by inventing imaginary prize-winners. But
when nearly three hundred thousand people took the bait, and the
total sum subscribed was more than 650,000, his office staff were
unable to cope with the sackloads of correspondence. Counterfoils
could not be filled in, no person of repute would consent to act as
trustee, and Bottomley found it impossible to carry out his pro
posed scheme. Meanwhile the cost of living had risen so steeply
that to keep up his luxurious style he was obliged to draw on the
subscriptions. He had been foolish enough to quarrel with Bigland,
who now began to harass him with pamphlets exposing his swindles.
He silenced criticism for awhile by publicly handing over 5 for
POST-WAR POLITICS 69
a single i Victory Bond certificate. This gesture, however,
brought him hundreds of requests from other subscribers to repeat
it; and he was obliged to employ a band of pugilists to protect him
from them.
When he had spent so much of the money subscribed that he
could not hope to repay it, he determined to crush Bigland. He
charged him with trying to obtain money by menaces. The case
was tried at Bow Street and, when Bottomley drove up to the
court, he was received with vociferous cries of Three cheers for
Mr. Bottomley . He had previously arranged for a claque of demon
strators, at the rate of five shillings each, to stir up a crowd that was
naturally eager for his name to be cleared. Bottomley, however,
fumbled the case: he made the mistake of calling a witness who,
under cross-examination, admitted that terms of apology for
Bigland had already been written out. By whom? asked the
magistrate. By Mr. Bottomley , was the answer. This revealed
to the magistrate that the charge was framed: he dismissed the
case.
Bottomley then brought a second action against Bigland at
Shrewsbury, but when the evidence was called it became obvious
that it was no longer Bigland, but Bottomley who was on trial.
Bigland s assertions could not be disproved, for Bottomley dared
not produce his books. The case was again dismissed and Bottom-
ley was now ruined thousands of demands were pouring in for
the repayment of Victory Bond subscriptions. The Times devoted
a leader to exposing him, and the Daily News charged him with
quite unconceivable obliquity and hypocrisy . Nevertheless, he
tried to explain himself in his own newspaper, the Sunday Illus
trated. When this failed to restore confidence, he resolved on a
bluff. He wrote to the Director of Public Prosecutions, inviting
him to take possession of all his books; after destroying every dam
aging document that he could find. The next day a summons was
served; his affairs were examined at Bow Street in March 1922, and
he was committed for trial at the Old Bailey. The trial was in May,
and he pleaded most decidedly not guilty . The concluding speech
for the prosecution was held over by the intervention of a week
end. Bottomley tried to brazen things out: he went on Saturday to
a boxing contest at the Crystal Palace and spent Sunday drinking
champagne. On Monday the jury found him guilty and he was
70 POST-WAR POLITICS
sentenced to seven years penal servitude. The House of Commons
immediately expelled him.
When he was freed in 1927, he tried desperately to regain his
old position, first by writing up his prison experiences for the news
papers under the title: *I Have Paid, But . These included a
poem, in imitation of Oscar Wilde, The Ballad of Maidstone Gaol .
He next tried to start a rival to John Bull called John Blunt, but it
failed within a year. Finally he was reduced to shambling on to the
stages of cheap music-halls and telling a few bad jokes in a scarcely
audible voice for a wretched wage. He died in 1933, having made
the headlines again a short time before with a buoyant interview
granted to the Daily Mail s star reporter Margaret Lane, in which
he babbled about his old-age pension.
A great deal of political lying and deception was practised on
the British public and with far more dangerous results in the
later Thirties; but the large-scale personal despoliation of poor
people s savings was not tried again throughout the Peace.
CHAPTER SIX
Various Conquests
Shortly before the Great War, there was a feeling current among
people of ideas it was most emotionally expressed by E. M.
Forster in a Utopian short story The Machine Stops that Man
had at last with the help of machines conquered the forces of
Nature, and that it was a dangerous conquest. Now that he could,
if he wished, easily provide sufficient food, clothing, and shelter for
every member of his species throughout the world, and store up a
surplus against difficult times, and control birth, and cure most
diseases, and navigate the stormiest oceans, and even fly: what
world was left for him to conquer? Would he not slothfully rest
upon his laurels and grow fat and out of condition? Well, the war
certainly had sweated off a few pounds of Man s surplus fat, and
war damage provided his machines with plenty of repair work:
thus putting off the miserably perfect millennium for another
decade or two.
Meanwhile, there were still several conquests to complete, and
even some fresh ones to make. The nineteenth century had been
the great age of exploration; but even the more recent American
discovery of the North Pole and the Norwegian discovery of the
South Pole had not ended geographical romance. There still re
mained the South Polar Continent to survey and other enormous
unexplored territories in Greenland, Siberia, the Arctic, New
Guinea, Central America, Brazil; the forbidden city of Lhasa in
Tibet (visited but not explored by Sir Francis Younghusband be
fore the war) and the lost city of Sheba in Hadramaut, and the
secret city of the Senussi in the African deserts. And there were
many still unclimbed mountains among these Mount Everest, the
highest in the world. Even in England there were hundreds of miles
of underground caverns, in Derbyshire especially, where the foot
7 1
72 VARIOUS CONQUESTS
of man had not trodden since Neolithic times, if ever and a few
hazardous precipices unsealed on Snowdon and in the Lake Dis
trict.
To the few whose thirst for rough living and adventure had not
been quenched by the war, these mopping-up operations were ex
tremely attractive, and the publicity value of success would amply
cover expenses. The assistance of the Press to discovery was no
novelty: the Stanley Expedition to Africa in search of Dr. Living
stone had been sent out by the New York Herald. Britain scored
a number of successes Dr. McGovern was first into Lhasa after
painfully disguising his blue eyes with lemon juice, Mrs, Rosita
Forbes (escorted by a young Egyptian diplomat, whom she rather
pushed into the background on her return) first into the Senussi
capital, and an official British surveying party made an end-to-end
journey through the hinterland of New Guinea, despite the opposi
tion of several hitherto unrecorded tribes of British subjects.
Britain was anxious to add the South Polar Continent to her list
of trophies, for the nearest inhabited land, South Georgia, was
under the British flag, a lonely customs-officer being posted there
permanently for the convenience of whalers. In 192 1 a Polar expedi
tion sailed under Sir Ernest Shackleton in The Quest-, they were
provided with a number of new devices for exploration, including
an aeroplane. Thousands of visitors inspected The Quest as she lay
at anchor in the Thames, but the new methods of journalism con
centrated public interest less on the object of the expedition for
fantastic geographical expectations had been disappointed in 1911
when the South Pole was reached by Roald Amundsen than on
the drama of the Ideal Scout. There was a last-minute vacancy for
a handy boy in the expedition and it was to be reserved for the
toughest, smartest, and manliest boy scout who volunteered; after
several days suspense the scout selected of the many thousands who
offered proved to be Scout Marr, a Scot. The anticlimax came
when, on arrival at South Georgia, Shackleton died of influenza,
and his men, abandoning the proposed raid on the South Pole, made
less hazardous explorations along the fringes of Antarctica.
Mount Everest defied every British attempt to reach the summit.
A reconnaissance was made in the spring of 1921, when a height
of 23,000 feet was attained, and a serious attempt in 1922. By push
ing up supply camps to increasing altitudes, and using oxygen
VARIOUS CONQUESTS 73
apparatus, four members of the expedition attained 25,000 feet; and
two of these pressed on to 27,300 feet only some 1,700 from the
summit. The monsoon then broke, seven Tibetan porters were
swept away, and the attempt was abandoned. General Bruce, the
organizer of the expedition, tried again in 1924; the hardships were
more severe than ever, the monsoon threatened to break early and
the oxygen supply began to fail. Two of the party, Mallory a
veteran climber and a young fellow named Irvine, may have reached
the summit. They were going strong up the final easy slope when
last seen and photographed through a telephoto lens; but they failed
to return to camp. Mallory was a public-schoolmaster with three
children. Though a fanatic in his feeling for mountains, his rational
excuse for attempting the climb was to gain a reputation that would
secure him a teaching appointment under the new Oxford Exten
sion scheme. He had originally taken to climbing to correct a weak
heart.
These expeditions seemed like extra events in the Olympic Games
series, and brought out the same unsporting instincts in patriotic
sportsmen. It was a matter of great regret, for instance, that a
German, poaching on what the British considered their territory,
bagged Sheba; and of small regret when a German climbing expedi
tion, intruding on the British Himalayan attempts, had no better
success and more numerous casualties.
The Derbyshire caves were gradually explored and charted, the
adventurers crawling through tiny holes, swimming through lakes,
even doing interior mountaineering. Rock-climbing became a pop
ular sport, and a new technique was introduced from America of ^
climbing in rubber-soled sneakers . This was regarded as rather
effeminate by the hob-nailed veterans of the perpendicular school;
but sneaker-wearers were able to score unexpected successes, by
scaling smooth two-in-three gradients on which the nailed boot had
found no purchase.
It was generally considered, however, that the glory of crawling
up or down into inaccessible parts of the world s surface was in
ferior to that of flying over it. The attempts on Mount Everest
were eventually abandoned, because of the shortness of the climb
ing season, but it was felt that a full revenge would be taken on the
jealous Goddess of the Mountain by flying over her. An expedi
tion for this purpose was financed by the cranky and ultra-English
74 VARIOUS CONQUESTS
Lady (Fanny) Houston. A weighted British flag was successfully
dropped on the summit, photographs taken, and no lives lost.
Lawrence of Arabia, the only first-rate strategist, tactician, and
story-book hero whom the war turned up, considered the conquest
of the air as the most important task of his generation. So did the
Daily Mail, which offered large money prizes to adventurous air
men. Aeroplanes had improved in speed and stability during the last
years of the war, though still resembling flying crates; and great
hopes were entertained for the future of civilian flying, now that
designers did not need to consider problems of armament and high
manoeuvrability. The Spectator reported in January 1919 that the
R.A.F. soon expected to open a Cape-to-Cairo service, and added
that London and provincial centres may be linked up for news
paper delivery and carriage of copy and photographs. Adam Smith s
"waggon way through the air" is about to be realized . In that
year a regular mail-service was started between London and
Paris.
What most caught the popular imagination were the various
attempts to fly the Atlantic. In April 1919 Major Wood and Captain
Wyllie tried it from east to west. Before starting, their machine was
blessed by an R.A.F. chaplain; but came down disappointingly in
the Irish Sea. In May, Harry George Hawker, who was employed
by the Sopwith Company as a test pilot, and Commander Kenneth
Mackenzie-Grieve, who had been navigator of an aeroplane base-
ship during the war, made a west-to-east flight in a machine
equipped with a collapsible boat. Anxiety and grief greeted their
non-arrival in Ireland, but the Daily Mail would not abandon hope.
Intense relief was felt some days later when the placards proclaimed
HAWKER SAFE. The plane had flown for fourteen and a half
hours, and then come down in the Atlantic. The intrepid aviators,
after an hour and a half in their collapsible boat, were picked up
by the Mary, a Danish steamer unequipped with wireless.
HAWKER SAFE seemed of immeasurably more significance than
the Versailles Treaty, which was just being signed, and all England
thrilled to read that the vicar of Hook, where Hawker had his
home, preached a sermon on the text: Tor this my son was dead
and is alive again; he was lost and is found. Triumphal honours
were prepared. Hawker and Mackenzie-Grieve were transferred
from the Mary to a destroyer and taken to Scapa Flow, where they
VARIOUS CONQUESTS 75
spent the night on board the battleship Revenge-, next they were
put on board another destroyer, which took them to Thurso, from
where they came south by train. At every stop along the line great
crowds gathered to greet them, and the jubilation at King s Cross
on their arrival recalled scenes at Victoria when the first trainloads
of lightly wounded came in from the Somme Victory of July
1916.
Meanwhile, six United States airmen in the seaplane N.C.4 had
left Newfoundland shortly after Hawker and Grieve. They reached
the Azores safely, having covered 1,381 miles. Two other machines
of the squadron were forced down, and their crews rescued. Com
mander Read of the N.C.4 was l ater given an official welcome at
Plymouth, and hailed as a descendant of the Mayflower emigrants.
Two R.A.F. fliers, Captain Alcock and Lieutenant Brown, made
the first successful flight between America and northern Europe,
starting from Newfoundland. This was on the zist June 1919, and
they used a Vickers-Vimy with twin Rolls-Royce engines; they
flew i, 880 miles in 15 hours and 57 minutes and on arrival in Ireland
had to make a forced landing, their machine sinking into a bog
up to the axles, and tipping up, nose down, tail in the air. Their
wireless had been out of action during the flight, so that they could
not give notice of where they were. As soon as they had managed
to telephone their whereabouts from the nearest Irish village, an
enthusiastic welcome was prepared for them. But it had not been
a Press-organized flight; so though the heroes were knighted and
shared a Daily Mail 10,000 prize for the feat, the exploit was not
a drama , and easily forgotten. (Sir John Alcock unhappily lost his
life in the following year an aeroplane accident in northern
France.) When the American Flying Fool Charles Lindbergh
made his epic solo west-to-east flight in 1927, it was generally
assumed even in Britain that this was the first time that the Atlantic
had been flown by a heavier-than-air machine.
The general opinion about Atlantic flights, in spite of public
enthusiasm for the fliers themselves, was that they had more scien
tific than commercial value, and more sporting value than scientific.
No freight could be carried, it was pointed out, in such small air
craft, and the strain of such long distances was bound to exhaust
the pilots. A great deal of organization and much mechanical im
provement were needed before Atlantic flights could become com-
76 VARIOUS CONQUESTS
mercially practicable. It was some years before anyone else made
the hop .
Similar doubts were held about airship travel. Early in 1919 the
Admiralty built two new hydrogen-filled airships on the German
model, with which to attempt an east-to-west Atlantic flight. These
were the R33 and R34, and both made successful trial trips over
Britain. On July 5th the newspapers reported that the R34 had left
her hangar in preparation for a voyage to New York: she was
expected to make the crossing in forty-eight hours. The R33, mean
while, flew over London and impressed people more with her
elegance than her size. The R34 did indeed reach Long Island
safely and landed at Roosevelt Field. The first man to arrive in
America from Britain by air was Major Pritchard, who leaped out
of the airship in a parachute, in order to give landing instructions
to the ground-crew. A stowaway, found in the gas bags, provided
the human drama. The trip was considered glorious as a sporting
achievement, useful in stimulating good feeling between Britain
and the United States, but disappointing from a commercial point
of view. The airship, which arrived with no more than one hour s
supply of petrol left, had taken 108 hours to make the crossing, and
twice, over Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, had been badly
buffeted and blown out of her course by thunderstorms too high to
affect ocean-going liners. General Maitland, her commander, re
vealed in his log that the dangers of the voyage had been greatly
underestimated. Not until weather conditions over the Atlantic
were more closely investigated could airships compete with liners:
as yet they were neither safe nor speedy. The regular aerial ferry
to New York remained a pipe-dream for another twenty years.
The most remarkable flight of all, but one that strangely enough
was almost uncelebrated in the Press, was that of M Intosh and
Parer from England to Melbourne. These were two Australian
lieutenants who determined, when the war ended, to go home by
air in a condemned D.H-9, bought for a few pounds. Almost every
part of the machine was defective, including the petrol-pump and
magneto, bolts kept working loose from the engine and propeller,
the struts were unsound, the instruments faulty. They started on
the 8th January 1920, had vexatious delays in France, climbed up
to 14,000 feet to avoid a storm over the Apennines and then as they
were about to cross the Adriatic went on fire at 3,000 feet, but
VARIOUS CONQUESTS 77
extinguished the flames with a steep dive. They reached Cairo, by
way of Athens and Crete, after forty-four days; the usual flying
time for this distance was forty hours. Everyone there thought the
two men crazy to persist in their journey, but they patched up the
machine and flew on east. They had to come down in the central
Arabian desert because of engine trouble, M Intosh keeping Arab
marauders off with Mills bombs and a revolver, while Parer tinkered
with the plane. He got her off just in time. They reached Baghdad
the first time that the flight from Egypt had been made changed
a broken propeller, and flew on over Baluchistan to India. Parer
remarked, We ll fly this bloody crate till it falls to bits at our feet.
He did so, and more. When the engine failed over the Irrawaddy
jungle they made a lucky forced landing; but soon afterwards a
crash at Moulmein wrecked the undercarriage, smashed the radia
tor, and damaged the compass. For six weeks they worked in the
jungle at fitting together the bits ancl pieces and then took off again.
They crashed twice more, but somehow managed to cross the most
dangerous obstacle of all, the Timor Sea, where they lost their
bearings and flew blind, reaching Australia with only a single pint
of petrol left in the tank. Their last crash was at Culcairn, close to
their goal: there was practically nothing left unbroken of the
D.H-9, but the two airmen escaped unharmed. The fragments of
the machine were reassembled for exhibition in the Sydney Mu
seum; Parer and M Intosh were decorated by the Australian Prime
Minister and given a purse of 1,000 to defray their expenses. They
had already paid part of these by trick-flying and scattering hand
bills over the cities passed in their flight. M Intosh died soon after- -
wards in a plane accident; Parer later operated a self-supporting
unsubsidized air-line in New Guinea between the coast and the
goldfields in the interior.
Experiments in controlling aircraft by wireless from the ground
were still unsuccessful, but ordinary commercial flying developed
rapidly. In 1922 aeroplanes began to be used for sky-advertising:
plans were made for using luminous smoke by night and coloured
smoke by day. On Derby Day, shortly before the main race, a
small machine appeared over the course two miles up in the sky and
traced the words Daily Mail in smoke-letters half a mile high. Aero
planes were also employed to fly low with advertisement streamers
usually for such commodities as Bile Beans.
78 VARIOUS CONQUESTS
In 1922 flying had not yet become popular among business men
who travelled to and from the Continent. They complained that
the converted war-machines then in use were not sufficiently com
fortable; and when more luxurious air-expresses were introduced,
they complained of the time lost on motor connections between the
airports and the cities. The volume of air-mail passing between
London and Paris was also at first disappointing. The speed of aero
planes then only one hundred miles an hour did not allow much
time to be saved over so short a distance. Passenger air-traffic was
therefore seasonal; summer vacations, when a large number of
American tourists used the air, were the most profitable time.
By 1923 many improvements had been introduced. The new
steel aircraft inspired far more confidence than the early wood-and-
wire contraptions. Air-expresses were flying in all kinds of weather,
except thick fogs, and experiments were made in night flying
until then direction-finding equipment had only served for day
flying. In 1924 a unified system of radio communication was put
into force throughout Europe, to assist in direction finding. Further
technical improvements, such as slotted wings to reduce landing
speed, and three-engined planes, were adopted. In 1923 the Gov
ernment approved plans for a commercial airship service to Egypt,
which it was hoped would eventually extend to India and Australia.
Experiments were also made in the production of gliders with small
accessory motors; a prelude, it was hoped, to cheap, popular flying.
Another still incomplete conquest was the air 7 in the other
sense: wireless telegraphy. The drama of wireless had engrossed
the headlines several times before the war: there had been Philips
of Godalming, the heroic wireless operator of the sinking Titanic,
and the arrest at sea by means of wireless of the murderer Crippen
as he was escaping to Quebec in disguise with his accomplice Miss
Le Neve. During the war wireless had been of immense service in
naval warfare, particularly in the rounding up of German com
merce-raiders. But as yet the American development of popular
broadcast news and entertainment had not reached Great Britain.
This came with the Peace and at first was carried on in a haphazard
manner by amateurs* The game was so fascinating that soon
mechanically minded youths were everywhere busy in their home
workshops building crystal receiving sets, and transmitters too,
from electrical odds and ends. The range of even the best sets was
VARIOUS CONQUESTS 79
limited and it was generally thought that the curvature of the earth
would prevent direct communication between its distant parts. In
1919 large-scale transmission was undertaken by the Marconi Com
pany from Writtle, near Chelmsford. Weather reports and time
signals were at first the only regular features broadcast by the com
pany the term broadcast had just been imported from the United
States; and the eight thousand wireless amateurs in England found
it hard to convince the Postmaster-General that a weekly half -hour
concert broadcast would not interfere with the reception of com
mercial messages by official stations. Only a vigorous agitation
secured them permission for this to be arranged. Their appetite had
been whetted by a special concert sponsored by the Daily Mail, at
which Dame Nellie Melba sang Dame , by the way, still had a
slightly comic sound, titles for women having been a war-measure.
In 1922, after further pressure, the Postmaster-General permitted
the formation of a broadcasting company, which would give reg
ular programmes of entertainment from several stations. So began
the British Broadcasting Company it was not elevated to the
dignity of a corporation for another four years. Wireless manu
facturers were to organize it, the Postmaster-General undertaking
in return to stop the importation of foreign sets for two years, and
to pass on five shillings of the yearly ten-shilling licence fee for the
upkeep of the stations. Any manufacturer could join the B.B.G on
taking out a i share. Since the state-socialistic Lloyd George Gov
ernment was still in power, the B.B.C. was given the same sort of
monopoly of the aether as the Post Office enjoyed on the earth.
The step was justified on the grounds that the aether in America
was in such a confusion from the cut-throat jamming of one another
by rival stations, that it would be wise to keep British aether under
a single control before rival commercial interests began a war in it.
Stations were set up in London, Cardiff, Birmingham, Glasgow,
Newcastle, Bournemouth, and Aberdeen. Simultaneous broadcast
ing was tried, and it was proved that programmes on different
wave-lengths did not interfere with one another. In the early days
of the B.B.C. the big London stores set up loud-speakers whenever
there was a special concert, and large crowds of shoppers gathered
around them. Sometimes the concerts failed to come through. There
is a story that on one of these occasions the younger Mr. Selfridge
promptly relayed gramophone records to the crowd in his store,
8o VARIOUS CONQUESTS
which was completely taken in. A triumph over the other less re
sourceful stores, where the crowds complained bitterly of hearing
nothing. The most successful broadcast items were excerpts from
operas, performed by the National Opera Company. Thousands
more heard Dame Nellie Melba. The managers of concert halls,
however, were so suspicious of broadcasting that Chappell s, for
instance, declared war on wireless and refused to allow any of its
artistes to broadcast. At the same time, newspapers denounced the
B.B.C. news reports as farcical resumes of newspaper work. Some
papers rather mischievously started a campaign for the broadcast
ing of the proceedings of the House of Commons, and spoke of a
wireless Hansard , and of the beneficial effects it would have upon
electors to hear their representatives speak. The House wisely
refrained from adopting the suggestion: debate in 1922 did not
reach a very high oratorical level and, besides, Parliamentary pro
cedure involved long pauses, confused noises, and formal divaga
tions which would have given an impression of muddle and wasted
time.
The B.B.C., with its headquarters at Savoy Hill, Strand, was a
lively and informal company: it had not begun to take on the
serious and stifling air of a Government department. The voices of
announcers often came over queerly, not only because transmission
and reception were still very uncertain and every V was a whistle,
but because there was as yet no system of tests to standardize an
nouncers voices within a certain register. Nor was there yet any
thing like so strict a surveillance as ten years later either of the per
formers scripts or of the private morals of B.B.C. employees. The
Bishop of London was the victim of one of the very frequent mis
takes that occurred at the microphone. He was understood to end
a very solemn address with the ironical aside 1 don t think! ; but he
had merely been cut off while remarking I don t think that was too
long, do you?
By 1923 wireless began to enjoy a boom of which notice was
taken by advertisers, though the American system of advertising
directly by wireless was forbidden in the B.B.C. s charter. Rinso,
for instance, used the slogan Rinso washes while you listen in ,
and showed a housewife sitting in an arm-chair by the fireside
wearing earphones, while a tub of washing soaked in a corner. But
the B.B.C. was having trouble with its revenue. The Post Office
VARIOUS CONQUESTS 8l
proposed that wireless sets should be taxed according to their type.
Only bona-fide experimenters were to be exempt from the tax.
Most listeners bought the parts of their sets and assembled them at
home, regarding themselves as bona-fide experimenters. The cost
of keeping up the B.B.C. thus fell upon the wireless manufacturers,
who naturally complained. People were, in fact, more attracted by
the fun of putting sets together and trying to make them work
than by the prospect of actually listening. Professor A. M. Low,
the scientist, considered that this hobby might have considerable
educational value, especially for women. He urged women to buy
for thirty shillings the parts of a crystal set and a booklet on how
to put them together; it would amuse them in their homes and teach
them handicraft.
Even in 1924 broadcast programmes were still short and lacking
in variety; but great excitement was aroused in August of that year
by apparently serious attempts to pick up messages from Mars. The
tests were made with twenty-four-valve sets, the largest and most
powerful yet constructed. The chief object was to test the prac
ticability of multi-valve sets, but it was also decided to try to pick
up again the mysterious signals which Signor Marconi had heard
three years before, and which were popularly supposed to come
from Mars. No signals from Mars were heard, but much was found
out about the uses of valves. To have a set with a large number of
valves became a suburban snobbery, like the number of cylinders
in pre-war motoring.
Science had gradually become the faith of numerous cold-
blooded people who had no use for revealed religion: their creed
was limited to: I believe in things only in so far as they conform
predictably to the known laws of the universe. 7 They also had a
morality: to judge nothing on insufficient evidence, not to make
evidence conform to preconceived ideas, and to pursue knowledge
only for the sake of knowledge, not for such ulterior ends as excite
ment, fame, commercial advantage or discovery beneficial to man
kind letting nothing stand in the way. The Martyr to Science
who inoculated himself with some rare disease in order to keep a
progressive watch on its symptoms, did not act for humanitarian
reasons, nor were the psychologist who induced nervous break
downs in rats by frustration of their habits, and the zoologist who
82 VARIOUS CONQUESTS
removed the sensory apparatus of bats and then set them loose in
a room full of wires, simple sadists.
Professor W. H. R. Rivers, the eminent ethnologist, psycholo
gist and neurologist, confessed that science practised in this sense
by himself and others was indistinguishable from any other morbid
compulsion. He greatly deprecated the Himalayan expeditions, say
ing that Mount Everest could wait another thousand years: mean
while this spare money and energy should be spent on ethnological
field-work among fast-disappearing primitive peoples, of the sort
that he had himself done among the Todas of Ceylon and in Mela
nesia. Thereupon, ethnological field-work came into fashion: the
explorer and (usually) his wife camping in tents near some primi
tive community in Africa, South America, or Oceania and taking
intimate clinical notes of rituals and taboos. Sometimes they were
such poor scientists that they became very friendly with their
subjects of study. The true scientist was not supposed to fraternize
with his guinea-pig, for fear that he might influence its emotional
behaviour. And sometimes they could not disguise their bawdy
relish in the sexual habits of primitives, and their reports were pub
lished rather as refined erotic reading than as stern works of re
search. The ordinary research worker was content to clear up some
thoroughly unimportant corner of science, without any thought of
its possible utility or significance. Almost his only relaxation was
the invention of new terms for phenomena: a painstaking zoologist
won a newspaper mention for a new worm, which he discovered
in the course of a round of golf with his colleague Professor Mcln-
tosh he named it Golfingia Mclntoshii.
The general public had no patience with these formalists of
science: they liked a man who invented amusing or useful things
rather than one who merely expanded the corpus of heavy knowl
edge. The newspapers knew this and gave no mention at all to
fresh zoological classifications, fresh mathematical formulae, fresh
unutilizable chemical compounds. But medical discoveries, espe
cially for the treatment of supposedly incurable diseases, were
TFront-page news. The use of X-rays in cancer it was reported that
80 per cent of cancer cases responded in early stages to such treat
mentand the insulin treatment of diabetes, seemed more important
than whole departments of ordinary science. X-rays added con
siderably to the thrills of boot-buying when West End stores used
VARIOUS CONQUESTS 83
them in their footwear departments to ensure the perfect fit. The
sort of scientific invention, however, that made the most popular
reading was a wireless receiver that could be fitted inside a hat, so
that people could listen-in while walking the streets, or a submarine
sledge, fitted with rudders and connected with a motor-boat, in
which, it was claimed, divers could glide about on the ocean bed,
independent of air-pipes, to investigate ancient wrecks. An amusing
invention in 1921 was the Lookatmeter, a dramatic exposition of the
dull scientific fact that the human eye radiated an appreciable amount
of energy: even a casual glance would deflect the sensitive plate.
Most of these inventions, all described as epoch-making , were
never heard of again after the first news-thrill; and so-called scien
tific expeditions to Panama, for example, to prove or disprove the
legend of the lost Continent of Atlantis never started, or if they
got there never found anything, or if they found anything never
found anything newsworthy. Generally it was the most useless in
ventions or stunts that attracted the most attention. There was a
magnificent Press for Dr. Flettner s rotor ship, which was propelled
by huge cylinders on deck rotated by the wind. The ship sailed all
right, but its use was altogether uneconomic.
In 1924 reports appeared in the Press that experimental work
was being done on a death-ray, and in more than one laboratory.
An inventor named T. F. Wall of Sheffield claimed to have pro
duced a ray that would set fire to anything inflammable, wreck air
craft, and destroy life. It could only be of use in warfare. Later,
however, Mr. Wall modified his machine and used it in an attempt
to split the atom. This seemed more dangerous still. People were
terrified at the prospect of a successful splitting of the atom; they
feared that it might set up a process in neighbouring atoms that
would blow up the world. (American scientists fortunately proved
that fear groundless, a few years later.) At the same time one
Grindell-Matthews invented a different death-ray, which he claimed
could also be used therapeutically, and was granted interviews with
the Air Ministry to explain its potentialities. The British Govern
ment, however, did not make him an attractive enough offer and
he therefore hurried off by plane to sell the ray in France. His
associates, who claimed a 52 per cent share in the ownership of
the invention, obtained an interim injunction to restrain him; but
arrived at Croydon airport just too late to serve it. Questions were
84 VARIOUS CONQUESTS
asked in the House of Commons about the advisability of allowing
such a valuable weapon to pass out of the country. The Under
secretary for Air replied that his experts considered it of doubtful
value. The Grindell-Matthews death-ray was occasional news
throughout the period and when at the end of the Thirties a new
war with Germany threatened, many found great consolation in
the belief that the East Coast of England was securely girdled by
pylons carrying an unbreakable band of death.
It was partly this popular disinterest in the more abstruse depart
ments of science that had no obvious application to life, and partly
the embarrassment of admitting that a German-speaking scientist
could possibly have found anything of real interest, that kept the
public unaware until 1921 of the genuinely epoch-making re
searches of Albert Einstein. Though only half a dozen British
mathematicians could follow Einstein s deductions from observed
phenomena, all agreed that there was no mistake in his formula.
The plain English of their deductions from his deductions was that
light did not travel in a straight line, and that Euclid s geometry in
so far as it claimed practical demonstrability for its theorems was
disprovable: because of the curvilinear nature of the universe two
parallel straight lines would eventually meet at a point. The inter
preters of Einstein were gracious enough to admit that Euclid s con
clusions were untrue only in the universal sense : as the geometry of
straight lines in another sort of universe, which might perhaps exist,
they were irreproachable. This was a terrible blow for elderly
mathematics masters and mistresses and for all who had held fast to
Euclidean truth as the one practical certainty in a weltering world.
There was worse to come. Philosophers had for centuries played
with paradoxical theories of existence such as the non-reality of
the seeming real but nobody took the philosophers seriously. One
could bang one s fist on an oak table to prove its obvious solidity
and echo Dr. Johnson s manly words: Thus I refute him! On the
other hand, astronomers and mathematicians were respected and
trusted implicitly, and a gasp went up when Professor Eddington
lectured in the summer of 192 1 to a crowded audience at the British
Association Hall on the physical implications of Einstein s work.
He declared that distance was not a constant gap, nor was space
finite, but both were variable relatives.
VARIOUS CONQUESTS 85
There was no serious attempt to disprove these conclusions: the
uselessness of defending any exploded universal theory had been
too often shown. ( What a knock the anti-evolutionaries had
taken! Well, well, so the crazy philosophers hadn t been so wrong
after all! The old materialistic theories of physics were dead.
Solidity being merely a subjective sensation, the reality of matter
was annulled, and energy alone remained if energy was the right
word for what was usually stabilized in material form and had
only an abstract existence apart from matter. People, then, were
no longer people but merely peripatetic points of view. This also
disposed of Time as a constant. What a joke! )
The theoretical dismissal of Time as a constant was followed by
a method of practically demonstrating its variability through a
case-record of one s dreams. The inventor of this method was J. W.
Dunne, a mathematician and engineer, well known as having in
1906-7 designed and built the first British military aeroplane.
Towards the end of the Thirties, J. B. Priestley, the novelist and
publicist, clearly summed up the conclusions of Dunne s Experi
ment with Time, first published in 1927:
Dunne believes that each of us is a series of observers existing
in a series of Times. To Observer One, our ordinary fully awake
sharp selves, the fourth dimension appears as Time. To Observer
Two, which is the self we know in dreams when the first observer
is not functioning, the fifth dimension would appear as Time.
This second observer has a four-dimensional outlook, and this fact
explains the fantastic scenery and action characteristic of dreams.
Dunne says this is because we try to interpret in our ordinary
three-dimensional fashion these strange images gathered by our
four-dimensional selves, who have to work during sleep without
the sharp focus and business-like attention of the first observer.
Remembering dreams on waking, we feel as if we had been plunged
into another kind of existence . . . and there is often lingering in
our minds a feeling that somehow they were oddly significant.
Now Dunne holds that the dreaming self, now moving in Time
Two, has a wide length of Time One, the fourth dimension,
stretched before it, and so contrives to telescope into the fantastic
narratives of dream both images from the past and images -from
the -future.
It was this interpretation of dreams, forced upon him by his
86 VARIOUS CONQUESTS
own experience, that opened these dizzy vistas to Dunne. Over a
period of years he remembered and analysed many of his dreams,
made elaborate notes, and then discovered that they ransacked the
future as well as the past. You dream that you see three elephants
walking round a pond. On waking you remember that the pond
is one you knew as a child. But you have never seen three elephants
walking in that particular fashion. Yet perhaps, years hence, you
will one day see three elephants not walking round a pond, but
moving in the same way as they did in your dream. You arrive at
that point in the track of Time One which you, as Observer Two,
to whom Time One is not real Time, caught a glimpse of years be
fore, in the dream. You will then be haunted by that strange feeling
of familiarity of having seen all this before. There are several ex
planations for it, ranging from reincarnation to a supposed occa
sional time-lag between the two halves of the brain. Dunne s seems
not only the most fascinating, but also the most satisfying. And
his theory of dreams went further than all others in accounting for
the queer scenery and personages and actions of these dramas of
the night.
Out of this Serialism of Dunne s came a theory of immortality.
. . . According to Dunne we catch a confused glimpse, immensely
confused and chaotic because we try to interpret what we experi
ence in terms that lack a necessary dimension, of this more com
plicated existence in our dreams. As a series of observers with our
attention for ever moving across new fields of Time that are really
added dimensions, we must, in Dunne s view, be immortal, or at
least, the ultimate observer in us must be immortal. We are en
gaged, according to him, in the process of learning how to live. On
this theory, the tragic brevity of Life is immeasurably expanded
and is no longer tragic.
This was more comforting than any conceivable form of the
traditional life-after-death, Whatever happened, one was always
somewhere, looking attentively at oneself.
The word relativity now came to be commonly used, out of
the context of Einstein s theory, to mean that a thing was only
so if you cared to assume the hypothesis that made it so. Truth
likewise was not absolute: beautiful results could be obtained
by mathematicians from consistent systems based on the hypoth
esis, for example, that one could slide a left hand into a rigid
VARIOUS CONQUESTS 87
right-hand glove or simultaneously into a pair of rigid right-hand
gloves. What an amusing conquest of man s this was! He had freed
himself for ever from the slavish and constraining superstition that
two and two necessarily made four! Later, when the revolutionary
Bohr theory of atomic construction was published, it was accepted
without demur by the experts as a logical deduction from the
known facts: despite the slight difficulty that a certain atomic ele
ment, in order to cross a certain space in no time at all, must tempo
rarily cease to exist. That was victorious news too discontinuity
was proved! And no joke was made of the fact that the strain of
working out this theory had put Nils Bohr into an asylum for the
insane.
What was better still, man need have none of the crouching
feeling of insignificance that had been enjoined on him by the
Church as soon as the Copernican system had been officially recog
nized. He was aware of the incredibly vast astral distances and
the absurdly large size of such stars as Betelgeux by comparison
with the Sun: now, with the improvement in microscopy, a new
universe was opening. The microcosm was as extensive in its way
as the macrocosm and organized apparently according to the same
formula. Man now felt balanced comfortably midway between
these two unthinkables. As a poet of the Twenties wrote:
Between insufferable monstrosities
And exiguities insufferable,
Midway is Man s convenience. We no longer
Need either hang our heads or lift them high
But for the fortunes of finance or love.
We have no truck either with the forebeings
Of Betelgeux or with the atom s git.
Our world steadies: untrembling we renew
Old fears of earthquakes, adders, floods, mad dogs
And all such wholesomes. Nothing that we do
Concerns the infinities of either scale.
Clocks tick with our consent to our time-tables,
Trains run between our buffers; Time and Space
Do not amuse us with their rough-house turn,
Their hard head-on collision in the tunnel.
A dying superstition smiles and hums
"Abide with me" God s evening prayer, not ours.
So history still is written and is read:
The Eternities of divine commonplace.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Sex
Only highly trained specialists in mathematics and physics could
hope to understand Einstein, Bohr, or others of their kind, and
the mass of the people were therefore rather in the position of
church-goers in the Middle Ages, who, even if they understood
enough Latin to follow the Mass, which was seldom, had no train
ing in ecclesiastical philosophy. They had to take the priest s word
for the accuracy of the dogma. Einstein, who became a popular
figure because of his fine head of hair, his fiddle-scraping, and an
unsuccessful argument with a Viennese tram-conductor over the
simple arithmetic of small change, deprecated all attempts to over
simplify his theory. He told an American woman who asked him
to explain it in a few words: My dear lady: a blind man was walk
ing with a friend down a hot and dusty road. His friend said: "O
for a nice drink of milk!" "Drink I know," said the blind man,
"but what is this milk you speak of?" "A white liquid." "Liquid
I know, but what is white?" "White is the colour of a swan s
feathers." "Feathers I know, but what is a swan?" "A bird with a
crooked neck." "Neck I know, but what is crooked?" The exas
perated friend seized the blind man s arm and stretched it at full
length. "That is straight," he exclaimed, and then, bending it at the
elbow, "this is crooked." "Ah," cried the delighted blind man,
"now I understand what milk is!"
Yet no warning of Einstein s against popular misinterpretation
of his theory could hope to be effective. The implications had
already been clarified by Eddington, and now Professor Wildon
Carr of London University observed: The religious importance of
the Einstein theory is enormous. It is going to produce a revolution
in religious thought. ... In fact, I should go so far as ,to say that
relativity can only be interpreted in terms of an immanent God
88
SEX 89
a reality which in its very nature is life and consciousness. If you
are going to get a concrete basis for the reality of the universe,
you cannot separate the minds of those who are observing from
that which they observe. . . . Materialism as a world-view is left
in the air. This was a not very scientific conclusion; for, scientifi
cally speaking, God was not an axiom but an unproved hypothesis,
or group of conflicting hypotheses. The fact was, the popularizers
of science found it difficult to slough off the habit of religious
thinking and usually remained at least broad-churchmen, as had
Darwin. Professor Jeans, for example, who was then contemplating
the mysterious universe and who published his reflections some
years later, did not find his patriarchal conception of the Deity in
consistent with the fantastic figures-to-the-power-of-letters in
which he dealt. As for materialism, that was soon to reappear
sturdily: for though solidity might in a philosophical sense be only
an illusion, yet if one bumped one s head on a low lintel it still
hurt; and though two parallel straight lines might ultimately meet
at a point, nobody would ever live long enough, however fast he
travelled, to observe that phenomenon. Meanwhile the blessed
word relativity was applied by the revolutionaries whom the war
had made to moral and ethical contexts and with no consideration
at all for Divine Immanence.
The study of comparative religion and the overseas observations
of soldiers and sailors had long popularized the notion that while
nearly all ethical systems claimed final truth, they contradicted one
another, and that there were good and bad people in all ethical
systems. Two possible conclusions could be drawn: either that it
did not really matter what one did, though it was more comfort
able to conform to the reigning system of ethics in the country to
which one belonged, or that it mattered a great deal, though virtue
lay less in the truth of an ethical system than in the sincerity and
loving-kindness with which private lives were lived. But which
ever of these two conclusions was reached, it seemed desirable that
the ethical system should become looser in some articles and stricter
in others. Samuel ( Erewhon ) Buder, a prophet before his time,
had suggested in his Note Books that any sexual practice in vogue
among nice people at any remove of space and time could not be
reprehensible. The Greeks and Polynesians he thought nice people,
and was perhaps making a covert plea for both sentimental homo-
90 SEX
sexuality and pre-marital promiscuity. Samuel Butler was widely
read in the Twenties.
Homosexuality had been on the increase among the upper classes
for a couple of generations, though almost unknown among work
ing people. The upper-class boarding-school system of keeping
boy and girl away from any contact with each other was respon
sible. In most cases the adolescent homosexual became sexually
normal on leaving school; but a large minority of the more emo
tional young people could not shake off the fascination of perver
sity. In post-war university circles, where Oscar Wilde was consid
ered both a great poet and a martyr to the spirit of intolerance,
homosexuality no longer seemed a sign of continued adolescence.
Shakespeare, Caesar, Socrates, and Michelangelo were quoted in
justification of the male practice; Sappho, Christina of Sweden,
and the painter, Rosa Bonheur, of the female. True, Christianity
condemned it, but Relativity dismissed Christianity as a take-it-or-
leave-it hypothesis. So long as one acted consistently in accordance
with one s personal hypothesis, and was not ashamed of what one
did, all was well. Thus homosexuals spent a great deal of their time
preaching the aesthetic virtues of the habit, and made more and
more converts. Their text-books were The Intermediate Sex, a
bright little volume by Edward Carpenter, and Havelock Ellis s
massive The Psychology of Sex. The Lesbians were more quiet
about their aberrations at first; but, if pressed, they justified them
selves more practically than the men by pointing out that there
were not enough men to go round in a monogamous system, and
that though the Act of 1886 penalized sodomy there was no definite
illegality in the female practice if not performed to the public
scandal.
When anti-French feeling in 1922 had caused a revulsion in
favour of the poor downtrodden Germans, the more openly prac
tised homosexuality of Berlin seemed brave and honest: in certain
Berlin dancing-halls, it was pointed out, women danced only with
women and men with men. Germany land of the free! The Les
bians took heart and followed suit, first in Chelsea and St. John s
Wood and then in the less exotic suburbs of London.
Havelock Ellis had been a pioneer in the study of sexual psy
chology, but much more work on the subject had been done in
Germany and Austria than in Britain. The name of Sigmund Frend
SEX 91
was first popularly heard about 1920, though his methods were in
repute during the war. They were used by the psychologists con
fided with the task of treating shell-shocked patients in such special
hospitals as Maghull near Liverpool and Craiglockhart near Edin
burgh; there Freud s conception of the mechanism of dream
imagery was used as a means of finding out what suppressed fear
or criminal preoccupation, intensified by war-strain, was preying
on the patient s mind. When this was discovered it could often be
dispersed by practical advice or reassurance; the dreams ceased and ,
the patient, who was encouraged to take up some practical hobby,
gradually recovered. These psychologists were the straighteners
prophesied in Samuel Butler s Erewhon. But few reputable practi
tioners would go all the way with Freud, who had complicated his
simple thesis, of the disguised emergence in dreams of feelings sup
pressed in waking life, with a most fantastic one. He held that,
besides particular adult suppressions, there were general ones which
dated from earliest infancy and had a strong sexual colour: particu
larly what he called the Oedipus Complex, which made a male
child want to kill his father and enjoy his mother. This psycho
analysis the non-elision of the o in psycho before analysis was
noted by purists as a ready instance of the scientists increasing dis
regard of the humanities consisted in dredging up from the oozy
depths of the mind childish memories of thwarted inclinations
which would account for later aberrancies, and indeed for almost
every ruling motive in life. To be encouraged by a doctor to talk
about oneself in the most prattling detail, and to be listened to with
serious interest, was a new and grand experience, especially for
moneyed and lonely women who had had nervous breakdowns .
Followers of Dr. Ernest Jones, who had been psycho-analysed by
Dr. Freud himself, set up as psycho-therapists and made very hand
some incomes. To them, men and women were not thinking beings
of independent judgement, but behaviouristic animals whose natural
modes of behaviour had been interfered with by superstitious
moral codes.
The first requirement for mental health is an uninhibited sex-
life. To be well and happy, one must obey one s sexual urge. As
Oscar Wilde wisely counselled: "Never resist temptation!" Such
was the Freudian gospel as it filtered down into people s minds,
through translations, interpretations, glosses, popularizations, and
92 SEX
general loose discussion. Intriguing new technicalities were ban
died across the tea-cups or the Mah-Jong table: inferiority com
plex , sadism , masochism , agoraphobia , sublimination (which
got mixed up with sublimation ), id , ego , libido . A woman in
Mecklenburgh Square committed suicide when under psycho
analytic treatment. The inquest came before Mr. Ingleby Oddie,
the Westminster coroner. When he heard the technical evidence,
I am not a scientific person, he said, but it sounds to me like
jargon. The Press in general agreed. Though, as the Daily Mail
put it, real good has been done in cases of nervous breakdown
and paralysis by letting the bottled-up emotions have free vent
unconscious inhibitions often bring about a general weakening of
mind and body , one could have too much of a good thing. At the
end of 1922 the Daily News commented on a book by Isadore
Coriat, Repressed Emotions: We are all psycho-analysts now, and
know that apparently innocent dreams are the infallible signs of
the most horrible neuroses; and so we suppress our nightly divaga
tions as feverishly as a murderer tries to remove blood from his
shirt-front. The reviewer concluded by bidding his readers beware
of a morbid interest in their primal instincts.
Ecclesiastical comment was still stronger. Dr. Orchard, speak
ing in 1922 on Religion and Psycho-analysis at St. Paul s, Covent
Garden, pronounced psycho-analysis to be dogmatic and obsessed
with sex . Its attitude to religion was dangerous and confused , and
it gave unbridled license to free sex-expression . He believed in
self-control and counselled that the dustbin of the mind should be
left undisturbed. Psychology did, however, in his opinion, recog
nize the valuable gospel of sublimation, through which the sex-
instinct could be turned to higher things such as art, politics and
religion. But Dr, Orchard and other earnest self -controllers were
warned with equal earnestness by the Freudians how dangerous
self-control was to mental health; and the effect of mental health
on physical health was a commonplace even the women s col
umns in newspapers freely suggested that dyspepsia was as much
due to worry as to actual disorder of the digestive organs.
Psycho-analysis figured on the agenda of the Conference of the
Educational Association in 1921. Children, it was there admitted,
were given to fantasies. They were often liars, sensation-mongers,
and swaggerers, but this did not mean that they were deliberately
SEX 93
sinful. These propensities should be recognized and carefully di
rected. Teachers would greatly benefit in their dealings with chil
dren from courses in psycho-analysis. Children only told lies and
swaggered in order to gain the limelight. They should be trained
to enjoy a moderate amount of limelight otherwise they devel
oped inhibitions which made them incapable of leading a happy
adult life. Lady Betty Balf our, who spoke at one of the Conference
meetings, advised parents to abandon the moral attitude in dealing
with children. She declared she was not sure that the moral atti-^
tude was not responsible for all the crime in the world : but ex
plained that by the moral attitude she meant one that treated every
peccadillo committed by a child as a serious sin. Courses in psycho
analysis certainly led to very unusual pedagogical practices. A
woman practitioner explained in a book on the subject of chil
dren s libidos that she had discovered Case H., aged six years , a
furtive unhappy little boy, lifting up the chintz skirts of an easy-
chair and looking underneath. Why are you doing that? she
asked. Isn t it really that you want to lift up my skirts and see what
I look like? Case H. responded to the suggestion; she gratified his
curiosity and thereby saved him from a miserable and haunted
adolescence.
Freud, though the best known psycho-analytic prophet, was
by no means the only one, Dr. Jung ran him close, having an
equally remarkable theory of racial psychology, with its phobias,
suppressions, and popular fantasies. Jung did not agree with Freud
on every point, and the modernists were divided up into opposing
parties, Freudians and Jungites, in much the same way as they
were divided some years later into Stalinites and Trotskyists.
The most popularly compelling fiction of the day was sex-
problem fiction. The philosophical promiscuity of Aldous Hux
ley s, the gallant degeneracy of Michael Arlen s, and the earnest
mysticism of D. H. Lawrence s sex-ridden men and women were
weighed and compared even in Suburbia. A new character was
introduced into the English novel: the tragic female Don Juan
with her fatal lust for boxers, bull-fighters and such.
Sexual liberty was made easier by the newer contraceptives.
Hitherto contraception had been practised as if it were a sort of
secret vice, but now it came into open discussion as having hygienic
advantages over the old leave-it-to-chance system. Its former ad-
94 SEX
vocacy by the atheist Bradlaugh and the Neo-Malthusian League,
and its association with the pornographic literature of rubber-
shops, had to be lived down. A prophet was found to conduct this
difficult campaign with religious fervour, no sense of humour and
complete integrity Dr. Marie Stopes. She was not, as one might
suppose, a doctor of medicine, but of science, being a leading expert
on coal; and was fervently assisted by her husband, the well-known
aeroplane designer, A. V. Roe.
In 1922 she hired the Queen s Hall for a meeting to advocate
the use of birth-control as a cure for racial disease. Her platform
was honoured by the presence of the Medical Officer of Health
for Leicester, and the hall crowded by a queer, attentive, and
rather fanatical audience. She wore a picture hat. There were no
interruptions. But she soon encountered great opposition through
out the country. To the Catholics, the use of contraceptives, which
discouraged souls from birth, was only one degree less heinous
than abortion, which forcibly restrained them and was a lesser form
of infanticide. Dr. Stopes s reply to this view was that by the use of
birth-control one got fewer but healthier souls. She was not against
procreation; on the contrary. The Anglican attitude, expressed by
the Bishop of Woolwich at Oxford in 1923, was that the purpose
of contraceptives is to make possible the exercise of a spiritual
faculty for the satisfaction of a physical desire only, and to pre
vent the spiritual consequences for which the faculty was given
by God. Dr. Stopes replied in her monthly news-sheet that married
love was a sacrament and that one could not divorce the physical
from the spiritual. The Bishop of Exeter opposed birth-control on
racial grounds: he said that the French practised it and that as a
result their population was on the decline and they had to import
Italian and Polish workmen. But a Royal Physician, Lord Dawson
of Penn, came in on Dr. Stopes s side, and defended her thesis not
only on medical but on economic grounds.
Dr. Stopes later pointed out in her book, Mother England, that
though maternal mortality and infant welfare were being gravely
discussed by the doctors, very little of practical use was being
done about them: doctors often told a woman that to have an
other child would mean death, but never told her how to avoid
having more children, except by abstinence. It was to remedy this
sort of thing that she had inaugurated her birth-control clinic in
SEX 95
the East End. There she received in three months more than
twenty thousand requests for procuring abortions, mostly from
over-worked and sick mothers who were unaware that abortion
was criminal. Needless to say, she did not comply with these re
quests, but instead advised women on the correct use of contracep
tives. In 1926 when she wrote Mother England, prosecutions of
drug-sellers who claimed that their wares produced abortions were
averaging one a fortnight.
In 1923 the Catholics gathered their forces against her and she
had to bring a libel action against a writer who suggested that she^
was profiteering by the sale of contraceptives to working women.
In point of fact the clinic made no profits, and the profits from her
book Married Love, which went into ten editions, were devoted to
the upkeep of the clinic and to the Constructive Birth-Control
Society. In the course of this libel action Dr. Stopes stated that she
believed herself to be a channel of divine inspiration, and that the
art of contraception had been revealed to her in a message which
she had received beneath the old yews at her house at Leather-
head. This drew a scornful attack from the defending K.C.: Dr.
Marie Stopes will have you believe that God sent down this beastly,
filthy message! She lost her action; the words complained of were
found defamatory, but true in substance and in fact. As a result of
this unfortunate publicity a proposal to place the Oxford Union
Hall at her disposal was withdrawn at the request of the Union
Committee. However, A. V. Roe came in her stead to address the
leading undergraduate society. On being asked a searching ques
tion by an Indian graduate, he evaded it with the counter-question:
Tell me, do you think that birth-control is from God or from the
devil? The Indian remarked: I think that is the most ingenuous
question I have ever been asked in all my twelve years at this uni
versity.
In the next year the Cambridge Union carried a motion in
favour of birth-control and by the late Twenties the battle was
won. The Anglican clergy then generally came round to approve ,
of the contraceptive device recommended by Dr. Stopes after con
sultation with leading gynaecologists. She was careful to reassure
them that it was only intended for genuine married people: it.
could not be fitted to a virgin. A large and successful Birth-Control
Ball was held at the Hammersmith Palais de Danse, and to show
96 SEX
that it was a philoprogenitive movement, rather than otherwise, a
leading woman novelist attended it in an advanced stage of preg
nancy. Doctors, too, with the example of Lord Dawson to encour
age them, overcame their professional embarrassment and gave
birth-control information when it was demanded by patients. Most
of them, however, got it more explicitly from Dr. Stopes s books,
which were on sale in every decent bookshop and prominently
displayed in the rubber-shops also, side by side with The Master
piece of Aristotle, The Heptameron, Paul de Kock s erotic novels,
and The Merry Order of St. Bridget, with other books on flagel-
lancy.
Partly as the result of the widespread use of birth-control, there
had been changes in the prostitute s profession. In certain cities
during the war Nottingham was the most famous the enthusias
tic amateur had swept away all professional opposition. There were
a number of aerodromes and a large machine-gun school in the
neighborhood of Nottingham, and any soldier or airman, it was
said, could always get free sexual accommodation from the local
factory girls. The convention was supper with the girl and her
parents, who after a time politely retired to bed, and then, for
appearances sake, a loud good-bye and a slamming of the front
door with the visitor still inside. But not every city was so kind,
and the number of prostitutes in the country as a whole is believed
to have increased; the figure in 1922 is put as high as 75,000.
Prices, of course, varied immensely: the underground folklore of
the dirty story it had attained extraordinary dimensions by now
and was freely communicated to respectable women whose only
stipulation was that a story should be really funny, not merely
dirty included one that throws light on this point. Three sisters
decided to be in the fashion and take to free love. Being members
of the New Poor they decided that it would be foolish not to capi
talize their experiences. They set out after dark and agreed to meet
in their Kensington flat in the early morning. The eldest returned
home at midnight, the middle sister at two o clock. They compared
notes. The eldest had been to Bond Street: How much is six times
two guineas? The middle one had been in the Marble Arch dis
tricts: How much is seventeen times seven-and-sixpence? They
had to wait until breakfast time for the youngest, who had gone
down to Whitechapel: How much is a hundred and forty-four
SEX 97
tines tenpence-half penny? The economical style of this story
should be noted: humour was getting streamlined, like everything
else.
That so many professional prostitutes were still about suggests
that there was a phenomenal increase in sexuality; for the enthusias
tic amateur was as enthusiastic as ever. A young man who had to
pay for his pleasures would consider himself not much of a hero,
even if for the moment he had no regular woman friend. The
living together of young people who could not afford to marry
was socially recognized by now as companionate marriage and
considered even as a higher form of relationship than legal mar
riage.
Come, girl, and embrace, and ask no more I wed thee.
Why reck of churchling and priest. . . ?
The young author of these popular lines did, as a matter of fact,
in the end marry the girl to whom they were addressed: for he
became a farmer, and had to conform with the county, which was
still rather old-fashioned in such matters. The poor girl of Victo
rian legend who was betrayed by a wicked squire, cast off by her
parents, and forced to go away to London for to hide her sin and
shame was now a joking reference only. It was extremely rare for
an Englishwoman in the Twenties to be forced on the streets by
sheer necessity or the brutality of parents.
Prostitutes, plying chiefly for the benefit of elder men, had to
alter their ways. They became smarter and quieter in their dress;
solicited with tact. There was a steadily diminishing number of
prosecutions for annoyance and indecent behaviour. The common
prostitute had a far longer career now than before the war; she took
greater care of her health, drank less, attended the hospital clinics
fairly regularly syphilis could at last be cured if caught in an
early stage, and gonorrhea, though more dangerous to a woman
than a man, was not nearly so fatal and disfiguring as syphilis. Yet
veneral disease was still a tabooed subject in the Press, and a doctor
to whom an infected married woman came for treatment seldom
dared tell her in so many words what was wrong: for to accuse
anyone of having venereal disease was a highly slanderous act. Be
sides, a doctor did not want to cause trouble in the home . Conse
quently a great many children were born blind or half-witted who
98 SEX
should never have been born at all. This medical inhibition con
tinued throughout the period, but the general taboo against men
tion of venereal disease weakened. Sufferers went to qualified phy
sicians rather than to quacks and developed a social conscience
against spreading the disease. Moreover, blindness due to venereal
infection in the process of birth was after a time antiseptically pro
vided against in all lying-in hospitals.
The remarkable change in the sexual codes also showed itself in
a different attitude to divorce. The American view was adopted:
marriage was regarded as a social habit, rather than as a sacrament.
Where one had made a mistake it could be rectified by divorce, a
bright smile, and remarriage; though the process was not so easy
in England as in most of the United States. To bear resentment
against one s partner in such a mistake was ungentlemanly or un
ladylike. Noel Coward, in his autobiography, describes how at
Ivor Novello s parties in 1921 divorced couples hob-nobbed with
each other, and with each other s co-respondents . Divorce, how
ever, still carried a slight social stigma in old-fashioned circles,
especially where the woman was the offending party; to oblige
their guilty wives, therefore, most men were gentlemanly enough
to go through the farce of adultery with a woman unknown and
thus give their wives grounds for divorcing them. Divorce lawyers,
winking at this collusive irregularity, were usually able to fix the
husband up with a professional woman unknown and with cham
bermaids evidence at some Brighton hotel
In 1918 there were more divorces than ever before; in 1919 there
were half as many again. This increase was at first explained as due
to the interruption in family life caused by the war, to hasty war-
marriages, and to the fact that during the war many people for
geographical reasons had not been able to obtain divorces. Never
theless, the divorce-rate continued to increase steadily. In 1923
Lord Birkenhead, the Lord Chancellor, was complaining of con
gestion in the divorce-courts. The Matrimonial Causes Act of 1923
established complete equality between the sexes in regard to
grounds for divorce, and also, by extending jurisdiction over di
vorce to the Court of Assizes, lessened the cost of divorce to the
poor. The number of divorces then again increased: in 1928 more
than four thousand decrees nisi were made absolute. Eighty per
cent of divorces each year were undefended, and in only one case
SEX 99
out of fifty was the husband ordered to pay alimony: the American
gold-digging trick of marrying a rich man, goading him into in
fidelity, and then soaking 5 him, did not catch on in England.
The chief obstacles in the way of intended divorces were fear
of causing offence to religious relatives, the spiteful refusal of the
partner in marriage to sue, and the fear of sordid newspaper pub
licity. Whether or not one got sordid publicity was a matter of
luck. Sometimes the Press treatment of a case was by no means
damaging to the parties concerned. The Daily Mail gave promi
nence to the following charming dialogue between a theatrical
couple who had come to the parting of the ways .
Husband (cross-examining wife) : How did we live?
Wife: Well, we owed everybody. (Laughter.)
Husband: You struck me across the head with a sunshade.
Wife: A sunshade! Why, it was night-time. (Laughter.)
Husband: Well, you were always eccentric in your dress/
(More laughter.)
But, in general, what the public wanted was sexual detail of as
intimate a sort as was printable; and rather than lose circulation to
less scrupulous rivals, each popular paper began sailing as near the
wind as possible, especially where the Church or the nobility were
concerned.
The famous Archdeacon Wakeford case in 1921 was not a
divorce case for the wife firmly believed in her husband s inno
cence but one of Church discipline, and heard before an Eccle
siastical Court. The Archdeacon was accused of committing adul
tery at the Bull Hotel, Peterborough. He appealed from the deci
sion of the Consistory Court and briefed Sir Edward Carson to
appear for him: the appeal was heard at Downing Street at a Judi
cial Committee of the Privy Council. The protracted hearing was
enriched with sensational bedroom evidence by chambermaids.
Until the end it seemed doubtful what the verdict would be, for
who and where the woman in the case was never appeared; and the
chief witness for the prosecution mentioned pyjamas, whereas the
Archdeacon asserted that he had never in his life worn anything
but nightgowns. Carson, defending, accused Wakeford s brother-
in-law and one Moore of rigging a frame-up in order to discredit
100 SEX
him. Excitement was caused in court when, at the mention of a
girl with no wedding ring who was said to have been in the com
pany of the Archdeacon, the poet Edmund Blunden s wife fainted.
Mrs. Blunden had been giving evidence of having, with her hus
band, seen the Archdeacon dining unaccompanied in the Bull
Hotel on the fateful day. She suggested that the wedding-ring
incident was a confused recollection of the waitress. She herself
from feministic principle was not wearing a wedding ring why
should she, if her husband didn t?
The Archdeacon s appeal was dismissed, and a large anxious
crowd of women, who had gathered outside the court, cried out
sorrowfully, Oh, oh, there must be some mistake! They had
known him as the hard-working and popular Anglo-Catholic vicar
of a slum parish, from which he had been translated to the high-
church close of an East Anglican cathedral town. Cathedral society
preferred to believe him guilty if only because he was said to be
a policeman s son and to have shocking manners: when greeted by
his Bishop on Easter morning with the ancient salutation Christ is
Risen he had boorishly withheld the expected response, He is
Risen Indeed , and said instead: Tes, Sir!
The unfortunate Archdeacon was ruined financially, profes
sionally, and in health. He soon died, after a pathetic lecture-tour
on which, accompanied by his wife, he attempted to prove the ver
dict an unjust one. The lecture was supported with moving-pic
tures, to bring out especially the point about the pyjamas and
nightgown.
This was a comparatively clean case. The climax in sex-report
ing came with a High Society divorce embodying a number of
dramatic features, all of which were jam to the salacious public. It
happened that the defendant, a spirited woman, had refused either
to have a child or to use contraceptives. Though the balked hus
band was thus denied ordinary sexual intercourse, a child was born
as a result, she claimed, of his Hunnish practices . The husband
denied paternity and cited several co-respondents. Eventually she
proved her case, because the co-respondents could not be pro
duced, and medical evidence was submitted that her hymen was
still unbroken. The House of Lords, to whom the appeal was
referred, upheld the verdict which, the judges remarked, concerned
them nearly: for the child (who, by the way, closely resembled
SEX 101
the father) could in the course of time expect to take a seat in that
august House. This conclusion pleased everyone, and the wife set
up a Mayf air shop which no-one who was anyone failed to visit.
The publicity given to cases like this was not welcomed by the
legal profession, and eminent K.C.s found in them also an oppor
tunity for protesting against the employment of women jurors.
Sir Edward Marshall-Hall was reported to have said that he felt
at a great disadvantage in dealing with cases of that kind before
women as well as men. There are certain sexual matters which one
cannot possibly discuss, except with one s wife. The Press had
certainly gone a little too far on this occasion. Not long after, the
newspaper proprietors let it be understood that they had agreed on
a self-denying ordinance: they would omit all intimate sexual de
tails from their reports, so far as was consistent with their mission
of publicly branding vice wherever it appeared. A number of old-
fashioned readers had written to protest that their children s minds
were being corrupted by accidental contact with this beastliness.
They were making a virtue of necessity: anticipating the operation
of a strong Bill that was hurried through Parliament it became
the Judicial Proceedings (Regulation of Reports) Act, 1926. The
Press got cleaner and cleaner as the period advanced, and as the
sex-obsession waned.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Amusements
The country was now in the full sunshine of Peace. The two
former Britains, of the Governing Rich and the Governed Poor,
had returned, though not nearly so distinctly as before. People no
longer spoke to one another in trains as a matter of course without
introduction. Pedestrians no longer counted it their right to stop
lorries and private cars on the road and demand joy-rides . There
were few pre-war habits that had not securely re-established them
selves, though in modified or extended forms: the conventional
religious habit among these. Yet the regular communicants of the
Church of England, with women in a great majority, gradually
sank in numbers until in the Thirties they only just exceeded the
Roman Catholic figure, the well-to-do classes, especially in the
country, still regarded themselves as socially bound to the Church
by whose rites they were christened, confirmed, married, and
buried. But no more than socially: and Puritanism languished ex
cept in a few Dissenting congregations, and among the elderly.
The Rev. Samuel Chadwick, a Westminster preacher, was quoted
by the Press in 1921 as declaring that Multitudes have no interest
in the things for which the Churches stand. . . . Thousands of
young people are being brought up without religious instruction
and without religious examples. . . . Woman s rebound from
conventional virtue is as daring as her attire. The Press used
Church comment as a convenient measuring stick for popular
tendencies. It was news if a bishop denounced the modern girl,
and equally news if an advanced vicar gave select cinema-shows in
his vestry; but the scales were always slightly weighted in favour
of modernism .
Modernism , losing its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century con
notation of something to be disparaged because new, had become
102
AMUSEMENTS 103
synonymous with lively progress. Councillor Clark, of a South
Coast town, who thought seaside liberty in dress and behaviour
disgusting, was taken up by the Press with mock-seriousness, and
became a popular figure of fun, a sort of male counterpart to
DORA . DORA (the initials of the Defence of the Realm Act)
was the official spoilsport personified. Then Sir Herbert Nield, at
a meeting of the Lord s Day Observance Society in 1921, com
plained, We have gone reereation-mad/ There had been a de
terioration in the conduct of the people, he said parental control
was diminishing the Press had been affected by American yellow
journalism more and more people were cheating the railways by
travelling first class on third-class tickets Hampstead Heath was
crowded from 7 p.m. until midnight by young men and girls who
had much better not have been there at all crime was no longer
felt to be a disgrace and Sunday had become the greatest casualty
of the law. This last observation started a long controversy.
It is true that the habit of Sunday picnics in cars was now
emptying the city churches. So was the rambling habit: for those
who could not afford cars held that the country could only be
properly enjoyed on foot. Though hiking had not yet been im
ported from the United States, nor the Youth Hostel system from
Germany, many office-workers were forming themselves into
week-end rambling clubs , and going out by the new suburban
bus-routes to starting-points for long country walks. In 1923 the
London Underground, wishing to popularize Metroland and the
new Tube-extensions that were about to be opened, published two
guide-books to the north and south of the Thames. These con
tained twenty-three photographs of typical beauty spots and
twenty-three specially drawn maps, which will simplify the ram
bler s journey by field path from point to point . The Press made
out that large numbers of these ramblers attended country services;
and printed letters from readers to the effect that man came closer
to God in the Cathedral of the Woods than in a dull dogmatic
church. Soon instructions for particular rambles were given weekly
in two or three dailies.
In 1924 the Rev. H. L. C. V. de Candole of St. John s, West
minster, defended the Churches against the charge of being dull.
His sermon was summarized under the title, Why Are the
Churches Empty? Craze for Exciting Pleasures . Tf the services
104 AMUSEMENTS
are dull, he said, it is because people are not there to put life into
them. If the preaching is bad, it is because nothing takes the heart
out of an earnest man so much as preaching to empty pews. As for
the charge that church-going people are no better than their neigh
bours, let Thomas Carlyle answer "As to the people, I say the
best class of all are the religious people."
London was quite ready to listen to religious revivalists if they
were sufficiently good showmen. There was still a welcome for
Gipsy Smith, the Methodist, whose meetings in the Albert Hall
attracted as many as ten thousand people. His style was colloquial
and he would occasionally burst into song about birds and the
love of flowers. Photographs appeared in the Press, showing him
standing on one foot, hands poised, as if conducting an orchestra.
When a collection was held at his meetings he would often talk in
this style: Not a cent of your money will come to me; so that I
can hit you as hard as I like. Some of you say: "How are you
paid?" Do not ask rude questions! I am paid by the committee
from another source. Hands up those who are glad to see me here!
Now put them in your pockets! He would say that when a
mother cared more for jazz than for mothering her baby, it was
time someone spoke out. In modern cities the Devil was at large.
There was no real faith, and London life was a social swindle .
For his part, he would burn all Church creeds, for they served
only to keep people apart. If Britain was to hold her own she must
tighten her grip upon the Lord s Day. (At this point there were
usually cheers from the audience.) A Christian, in his opinion, was
a good sport, an open-air man, one who refused to tell or listen to
dirty stories, a teetotaller or, at least, a very moderate drinker
a humorist, a mother-lover. Smith appealed mostly to the middle
classes, and castigated them for drinking too much; Tour back
bone is made of cotton-wool. They loved such accusations. When
at the end of one of his meetings he invited all who needed more
of God to stand up, all but ten did. He asked these ten if they con
sidered themselves good enough. They, too, then stood up, But
like most revivalists who have tried to work independently of the
Churches, Gipsy Smith did not succeed in building up a permanent
following. By the end of 1924 he had ceased to be news, though
gramophone records of his Salvationist hymns had a wide sale for
some years.
AMUSEMENTS 105
The Church, in a belated endeavour to recover the souls that
it had lost by its opposition to Darwin, now signed a sort of con
cordat with the scientists, or rather with the popular scientists.
Canon Barnes, later Bishop of Birmingham, preached a sermon at
Westminster Abbey in 1921, in which he came out strongly in
favour of scientific modernism. He considered that man was not
originally endowed with a soul, but had gained it by a process of
evolution. Religion therefore dealt with the Ascent and not the
Fall of Man. The immergence of the soul in man, he said, is the
last stage as far as man can know. . . . Evolution was designed
to produce spiritual beings who can survive bodily death, and
enjoy eternal communion with God if they accept Christ s doc
trine of the immortality of the soul. The Canon warned his con
gregation, however, that acceptance of such biological views in
no way implied approval of spiritualistic doctrines. In Christian
teaching/ he said, there is no confirmation of the pretended revela
tion of modern spiritualists, that after death the spirit enjoys an
existence which is to some extent a counterpart of earthly life, with
spiritual clothes and even spiritual cigars. But here he was not on
firm theological ground. As Charles Wesley had long before
pointed out, to disbelieve in ghosts was to deny the truth of the
Bible h a d n ot the Witch of Endor summoned the ghost of Samuel
to an interview with Saul? Spiritualism continued to divert many
worshippers and a great deal of money from the still too materially
minded Church.
Leading Church-people did their utmost to prevent any exten
sion of public pleasures. Temperance societies, for instance, pro
tested in 1922 against the installation of listening-in sets in public-
houses, on the ground that this would make them too popular.
Local clergymen supported these protests, and in godly Notting
ham several publicans were refused wireless licences. The Bishop
of London declared that he would die on the doorstep of the
House of Lords rather than allow the passage of a Bill permitting
an extension of the closing-hour to 1 1 p.m. throughout London.
Largely owing to his energetic opposition the Bill was defeated;
but this neither decreased the amount of drinking, nor increased
public affection for the Church.
At the Church Congress of 1922 the Bishop of Birmingham
denounced bridge-playing as a waste of time and deplored the im-
106 AMUSEMENTS
morality of betting, and Dr. E. B. Turner declared that soldiers
who had found opportunities for promiscuity overseas expected to
carry on in the same way when they came home, and that moral
ity had been deteriorating ever since the beginning of the neo-
Malthusian campaign forty years before.
Nevertheless many clergymen and their wives and daughters
rejected the merely negative policy of frowning on lay pleasures:
they wished to start a brighter religion campaign. At the same
Congress, the Rev. Kenneth Hunt, an ex-international footballer,
defended the watching of football matches. He said that soccer
was clean, and the occurrence of deliberate fouls was greatly exag
gerated. For most of the poor, watching football matches was the
only alternative to sitting in pubs. An appeal was also made for a
revival of religious drama. Miss Lena Ashwell, who had been a
prominent organizer of concert parties for the troops during the
war, said: The theatre to-day is in a state entirely divorced from
real emotion. Its roots are superficial, instead of being deep in the
real springs of the religious life of the world. The wife of the
Bishop of Chester proposed that the naves of churches should be
used for religious drama. But, though the proposal was sym
pathetically heard, it was easier to pass motions in favour of re
ligious drama than to find dramatists to write it.
Sir Herbert Nield s criticism of the country as recreation-mad
was not unjust, if he meant the part of the country that had money
and was therefore in the news. A prime recreation of the poorer
part of the country, of course, was reading about the recreations
of their betters. The Press had learned from the United States the
art of witty headlining: already in 1921 it had publicized Relativity
with the jocular HUN PROFESSOR CATCHES LIGHT
BENDING. ( My word, if I catch you bending was still a popular
phrase.) News editors were finding out by sales tests what sort of
news whetted the appetite for more news. There were three main
condiments, crime, sex, and folly, but they must be served with
the potatoes and meat of respectability. Simple crime performed
in a sordid way by an habitual criminal was not news, even if it
was murder; conviction of prostitutes was not news unless some
one of note were involved; and folly in the provinces had to be
extremely original to win a mention in the Metropolitan papers.
Yet it was wonderful, once they had learned the trick, how jour-
AMUSEMENTS 107
nalists could conjure a mountain of news out of a molehill of fact.
In 1922 a few well-dressed young missionaries and a Bishop of
the Mormon Church in Utah came to London to make converts
of both sexes. A wild agitation was started against this Religion
of Lust . The Daily Mail proclaimed that Mormonism was founded
on fraud, and that the only antidote to the insidious poison that
the missionaries were spreading was to banish them from England.
An editorial announced: We believe that the Mormon quest for
girl converts in this country sins against our best instincts. . . .
Mormonism is a disgusting attempt to sanctify sensualism under
the garb of religion. Its purpose is the luring of innocent girls to a
life of misery. What Mormonism proffers to its simple-minded
victims is not honest marriage. We believe that this Mormon quest
for girl-victims nauseates every decent-minded person in the coun
try. The presence of the missionaries is a moral offence; it should
be regarded as a legal offence. Every Mormon missionary should
be sent out of the country. Bishop Savage of the Mormon Church,
in an interview with a Daily Mail reporter, said in reply to this
attack: If the Government tells us to quit, we shall quit. Nobody
said quit , however, because the Government knew as well as the
newspapers themselves that Mormonism, despite its successful social
undertakings in Utah, was a dying, dated faith, which might attract
a few cranky adherents of either sex, but had long since abandoned
its practice of polygamy, which alone would make it news.
Dancing was still the chief contemporary pastime. Journalists
wrote, pretending to be scandalized, of Nights in the Jazz Jungle .
Jazz in the early Twenties meant heavily punctuated, relentless
rhythm, with drums, rattles, bells, whistles, hooters, and twanging
banjoes. The wild melancholy saxophone and trumpet had not yet
come to England. A Daily Mail feature-writer described the at
mosphere of Jazzmania : Women dressed as men, men as women;
youth in bathing drawers and kimonos. Matrons moving about
lumpily and breathing hard. Bald, obese, perspiring men. Every
body terribly serious; not a single laugh, or the palest ghost of a
smile. Frantic noises and occasional cries of ecstasy came from half
a dozen negro players. Dim lights, drowsy odours and futurist
drawings on the walls and ceiling.
Protests from eminent persons filled the newspapers. Bishop
Weldon declared in 1920: The use of dances as a means of rais-
108 AMUSEMENTS
ing money for war-memorials is little less than a national humilia
tion. An anonymous surgeon exposed the great degradation and
demoralization of these wild dances . Leyton Urban District Coun
cil, in letting their municipal hall for dances, prohibited the one-
step and all forms of jazz. Analogies were drawn between the dis
order of jazz-music and that of jazz-minds; and girls who sacrificed
their nerves and beauty to the fox-trot were warned that old age
would claim them early.
Dance-steps were changing all the time: there was the Twinkle ,
the Jog Trot , the Vampire , the Missouri Walk , the Elfreda ,
the Camel Walk , and the more famous Shimmy . These were all
jerky steps; and though the quieter Blues came in late 1923, danc
ing did not long remain quiet, for the Charleston and later the
Black Bottom brought back the jerks. At first people danced
mostly at dance-clubs, but the larger restaurants were beginning to
introduce dance-floors. The Savoy was the first to popularize danc
ing with meals. Such attractions made fashionable the habit of
dining out, which few Englishwomen until then had practised.
Not until some of the DORA restrictions were removed in 192 1
did restaurant-life really begin. The Licensing Act of 1921 was
later much reviled, but at the time it was welcomed as an encour
aging concession to gaiety. People submitted willingly to ordering
unwanted sandwiches with their drinks after 1 1 p.m., and to having
their glasses removed at 12.30. Solemn warnings were meanwhile
being delivered by physicians on the drinking habits of the younger
generation. The Practitioner declared drink a repressant, not a
stimulant, and particularly deplored the effects of drink on the
young they lost their power of manly self -control . As for cock
tail drinking, it was the most reprehensible form of alcoholic
abuse . Although the restrictions of the Licensing Act were de
nounced by the moneyed and the young as absurdly Victorian, the
authorities continued to thwart all efforts to make London gay.
The first introduction of cabaret on a large scale The Midnight
Follies at the Metropole was banned by the L.C.C. A Brighter
London Society was formed in 1922 beneath an array of names
which included Lord Curzon, the famous Foreign Secretary, and
Gordon Selfridge; but it achieved nothing an^ DORA remained.
One effect of the law was to stimulate the rapid growth of
night-clubs: some highly respectable the Night Light had two
AMUSEMENTS 109
princesses and four peers on its committee some vicious and
squalid, all well attended and all very expensive.
A few so-called night-clubs were as punctilious in the removal
of bottles and drinks from the tables at the legal hour as in the
collecting of their heavy subscriptions. But with scores of night
clubs proper the only concession to the law was an attempt at
legalizing their club status by signing on new members at the
door the secretary generally proposing, and the negro-drummer,
or head waiter, seconding. This was not, however, good enough
for the police, who raided them with methodical persistence. Time
and time again well-known establishments were closed down and
their proprietors fined or sent to prison; time and time again the
self -same establishments reopened, their owners simply writing off
the amount of the fine, or the business losses involved in the prison
sentence, against the enormous profits made during the successive
short spells of existence. The police made no distinction between
the respectable and the vicious, so that every club had to be care
fully guarded against intruders by bolted doors and wickets; police
raids were often made by way of skylights. A raid on the famous
and fashionable Kit-Kat Club on the night following a visit by
the Prince of Wales, and the conviction of the manager of Chez
Victor , which had been the centre of night-life for some months,
thoroughly frightened fashionable night-club-goers, including a
number of debutantes. The Sunday Express reported in 1929 that
Victor had opened a new club in Paris, and that he had written
to Sir William Joynson-Hicks, the Home Secretary, who was re
sponsible for his deportation, asking him to patronize his club
whenever he was in Paris. c jix replied on Home Office notepaper,
expressing pleasure that he was succeeding so well and promising
to call when next in Paris. In spite of such gentlemanly exchanges
the clean-up was accelerated and the penalties made still heavier.
Lord Byng, the Commissioner of Police, was soon able to boast that
London night-life was dead.
Victor had shared with Mrs. Kate Meyrick the sovereignty of
the night-life of London. In 1921 she had founded the famous 43
at 43 Gerrard Street, where Dryden once lived. In her memoirs,
Secrets of the 43 Club (1933), Mrs. Meyrick wrote: 1 could pic
ture the old poet so clearly sitting at his desk, with sheets of paper
strewn around him and more lying about on the floor, his hand
110 AMUSEMENTS
clasping his brow in the effort of thought. I could follow the shift
ing expressions of his long, mobile face with its noble forehead, its
neat little Vandyke beard, and its frame of silky hair, once light
brown, now transmuted by age into silver. Her visitors list was
distinguished, for the times -Augustus John, Jacob Epstein, Joseph
Conrad, J. B. Priestley, June , the actress, Carpentier, the boxer,
and Jimmy White, the Lancashire millionaire, who one night
brought six Daimlers full of show-girls and ran a champagne party
that cost 400. Brilliant Chang s dope-gang operated there
Chang himself was a member, and had a restaurant opposite. Mrs.
Meyrick claims to have tried to stop Chang peddling in her clubs,
but remained on friendly terms with him. The 43 was first raided
in 1923, when she was fined 300 but allowed to pay in instalments.
In 1924 Mrs. Meyrick was sentenced to six months imprison
ment and served it in Holloway: winning great sympathy from
her distinguished clients, who now included the Crown Prince of
Sweden, Prince Nicholas of Rumania, Tallulah Bankhead, Edna
Best, Herbert Marshall, Jack Buchanan, and Michael Arlen. In
1925 she opened the Manhattan ; securing the custom of Gordon
Richards, the jockey, Sophie Tucker, the American Red Hot
Mammy, and Rudolph Valentino. Paul Whiteman, the American
King of Jazz, occasionally played there after his theatre shows.
King Carol went he was then in exile, and not so dissipated as
people said he was, Mrs. Meyrick observed. In 1927 came the
grandest place of all, the Silver Slipper in Regent Street. The
walls were painted with Italian scenes, the dance-floor made of
glass. Prince Nicholas, executing a particularly boisterous caper,
broke a small pane of it. Teddy Brown played there, and Brenda
Dean Paul was a visitor someone said of her: She wakes each
morning with a song on her lips just like a bird she had not yet
become a famous Society drug-addict. More raids and fines. In
1928 Mrs. Meyrick was implicated in the Goddard case: he was
a police-sergeant accused of taking bribes from night-club owners
and of passing false money. She unluckily had some of the money
and was sentenced to fifteen months imprisonment, Colonel
Barker was in prison with her at the same time a fantastic British
Fascist who had turned out to be a woman. Mrs. Meyrick came
out of prison in 1930, did a Continental tour, and then carried on
with the 43 : adding Jim Mollison, the airman, and Primo Camera,
AMUSEMENTS III
the boxer, to her roll of honour, but taking no risks with the police.
She had long since adopted the practice of running several clubs
at the same time, so that if one were raided and closed down, the
others could carry on even when she was in prison. Of the dance-
hostesses in her clubs, she wrote that nearly all of them married
happily. Three of her daughters, who stood by her throughout her
troubles, married into the peerage, by way of the 43 . May married
Lord Kinnoull, the racing motorist; Dorothy, Lord de Clifford;
Gwendoline, the Earl of Craven.
Among the smart people, fancy-dress parties had been fashion
able since the war ended. There was, for instance, a Russian party
at which a negro band played and for which a whole house was
specially redecorated A la russe Imperial Russian, of course, for
the U.S.S.R. was not yet fashionable. There followed a swimming
party, held at St. George s Baths. This was considered very daring
and aroused indignation among newspaper readers because of the
conjunction of a negro band with white girls in bathing costumes.
And yet the costumes worn were still very modest men s and
women s both had skirts, the legs came well down the thigh, and
the sleeves reached just above the elbow. Then there was a Mozart
party, held to the strains of Mozart s music with appropriate dances,
the guests wearing period costume photographs of them, posed
at Piccadilly Circus with the workers who were engaged in mend
ing the road, appeared in the illustrated weeklies. And another
party to which people came as their own ancestors.
Oxford and Cambridge were two main hubs of advanced recrea
tional fashion: they were not merely suburbs of London, as they
afterwards became. Such novelties as the canary-yellow hunting
waistcoat, green velveteen trousers, suede shoes, were initiated
there. The famous wide-bottomed trousers, Oxford bags , which
superseded the conventional peg-top variety in 1924 and set a
fashion for the whole world, are said to have started at Cambridge
two years previously. The elaborate type of hoax was another
Oxford borrowing from Cambridge. For example, a number of
dons attended Dr. Emil Busch s well-advertised psychological lec
ture and many were impressed by his foreign accent, stimulating
argument, and complicated vocabulary. He was an undergraduate
in a false beard. Then there was the duel in November 1923 at
Godstow near Fair Rosamund s Tower between cloaked figures
112 AMUSEMENTS
armed with pistols. After the first exchange one duellist fell bleed
ing, and doctors ran up to bandage him. The subject of the duel
was reported in the London Press to be an undergraduette of
Somerville , and great excitement was aroused. But no names came
out; and the blood was only red ink after all.
There was a fashion at both universities for eccentric clubs. In
1921 there was an Oxford University Hide-and-Seek Club that
had one very successful meet on Boar s Hill, in and out of the
gardens of the professors and prominent literary people who had
made it the most distinguished hill in England. At Cambridge, on
the other hand, there was a University Pavement Club, whose
members united in agreeing that there was too much rush in mod
ern life. One Saturday, at midday, members of the club sat for an
hour on the pavements in King s Parade, passing the time with
tiddley-winks, noughts and crosses, marbles and nap, reading and
even knitting. While they were so engaged, a Proctor passed and
they had to break the rules of the club in order to stand in his
presence while he took their names; he was so sympathetic that
after he had gone the club unanimously elected him their president.
They then bound themselves to sit for another hour next week
and carried a resolution that lunch-baskets should be brought. All
passers-by were invited to join in, in order to secure that unanimity
which is essential to pavement life . Then there was the Oxford
Railway Club, formed to popularize the pleasure of drinking on
trains at night. A party of a dozen young men in full evening dress
would board the Penzance-Aberdeen express at Oxford and travel
on it as far as Leicester; they would return at once by the Aber-
deen-Penzance express. On the outward journey they would dine,
and on the way back make speeches. Both universities had climb
ing clubs, the members of which did a number of extraordinarily
dangerous night-climbing feats on colleges, libraries, and museums,
causing much damage to ancient roofs. Almost every year at Ox
ford someone performed the classic climb up the Martyr s Me
morial to stick a chamber-pot on top. Usually the police shot it
down with a rook-rifle, but if it was enamel they had to rig up
scaffolding, at great expense.
Those were still the days of the long-standing war between the
hearty and the aesthete the hearty being the man who was up
chiefly in the hope of getting a Blue, and the aesthete being a
AMUSEMENTS 113
literary fop. At Oxford on Election Night, 1923, a prominent
aesthete in evening dress (who had introduced side-burns into
Oxford, carried about a pet monkey on his shoulder, and persuaded
Gertrude Stein to lecture to an undergraduate society) was mobbed
by a crowd of drunken hearties; in self-defence he felled a Rugger
Blue with a loaded stick. Hitherto aesthetes had been expected to
undergo debagging and having their rooms wrecked without pro
test or compensation and to like it. This same aesthete resented
the invasion of his room by drunken hearties after a binge so
sincerely that he drew a sword and cut off a thumb of one of the
invaders.
In younger London Society neither the literary aesthete nor
the hearty came much into the picture. The correct thing to do,
for intelligent young people with a fixed income and no particular
vocation, was to call themselves artists and live in Chelsea studios.
There they gave amusing parties and played at being Bohemian.
Bohemianism was understood to mean a gay disorderllness of life,
cheerful bad manners, and no fixed hours or sexual standards. One
sign of the perfect Bohemian was to use implements for uncon
ventional purposes: for instance, to spread butter with a cut-throat
razor, drink tea out of a brandy glass, or use a dish-swab as a hair
net. These people pretended to paint but had little or nothing to
show for their pretensions, and their chief influence on art was to
make the rents of studios rise so high that real artists could no
longer afford them. Pseudo-studios were chiefly furnished with
brightly coloured cushions, strewn about the floor or on divan beds
chairs were out of fashion. The Daily Dispatch hit off this kind
of life, under the headline Not Artists at all, but Arty People ,
with: They just talk about drawing and painting and their studios
are only used for dressing-up for parties and for dances "do s",
they call them.
Real painters were going abroad to work at first to Mont-
parnasse in Paris, until the arty people followed them there and
raised rents and forced them south to Cassis and Cagnes, or west
to Brittany. When these places had also been invaded, they went
as far as Spain and Portugal, or back again to some country part of
England. If they gave up the struggle and consented to become
London social parasites, there were always Mayfair hostesses who
would delight to show them off at mixed parties, along with actors
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and musicians, as latest discoveries . Indeed, artists who did not
cultivate such connections had a difficult time; for in May fair, the
best market for contemporary art, people had uncertain standards
of value and bought the paintings of impressive young men whom
they had met at parties, rather than paintings they really liked. In
general, the more intolerably assured, ill-tempered, and tyrannical
a painter seemed to be, the higher the prices he could command.
The same was perhaps also true of architects and interior dec
orators.
Mayfair was now a sort of informal university: with hostesses
for heads of colleges and a constantly changing never-completed
syllabus. The Bright Young People provided the sports, which
were harmless and playful. They first became news in 1924, when
the Daily Mail prominently featured one of their activities: A New
Society Game. Chasing Clues. Midnight Chase in London. This
was the birth of the treasure-hunt. People were given lists of most
dissimilar objects to find, sent off in cars to find them, and told to
rally again, usually at z a.m., at some central place such as Picca
dilly Circus or Charing Cross. They also held a party to which
all came dressed as very young children, and behaved in char
acter.
The discovery at Luxor early in 1923 by the British School of
Archaeology of the unrifled tomb of the Pharaoh Tutankhamen
was given typical Twentyish publicity. Ancient Egypt suddenly
became the vogue in March the veteran Professor Flinders Petrie
lectured on Egypt to an entranced Mayfair gathering. Replicas of
the jewellery found in the Tomb, and hieroglyphic embroideries
copied from its walls, were worn on dresses; lotus-flower, serpent,
and scarab ornaments in vivid colours appeared on hats- Sandy tints
were popular, and gowns began to fall stiffly in the Egyptian style.
Even the new model Singer sewing-machine of that year went
Pharaonic, and it was seriously proposed that the Underground
extension from Morden to Edgware, then under construction,
should be called Tootancamden, because it passed through Tooting
and Camden Town. Cambridge students staged an Egyptian rag,
raising from the dead Phineas, the purloined mascot of University
College, and awarding him an honorary Blue. A secret tomb (a
subterranean public lavatory) was prepared in Market Square,
and undergraduates appeared at the appointed hour, wearing towels
AMUSEMENTS 115
like Egyptian slaves. At the cry of Tut-and-Kum-in , the dead
Phineas arose. The lost tribes of Cleopatra then appeared and per
formed the Cam-Cam*.
But that was not all: a month after the principal discoveries Lord
Carnarvon, the leader of the expedition, suddenly died. A mosquito
had bitten him, near the entrance to the tomb, and the bite turned
poisonous. Almost everyone agreed that his death was due to the
Pharaoh s anger at having his rest disturbed. A well-known Egyp
tologist declared that a curse was undoubtedly responsible, though
tough Howard Carter, the deputy leader, laughed at the idea and
continued to excavate. Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock
Holmes, who was well known as a spiritualist, was asked for his
opinion by reporters on board the Olympic at New York. He ob
served mysteriously: An evil elemental may have caused Lord
Carnarvon s fatal illness. One does not know what elementals
existed in those days, nor what their power might be. The Egyp
tians knew a great deal more about those things than we do. Dur
ing the next few years, several other members of Lord Carnarvon s
expedition died, from natural causes, and each time the rumours
of Pharaoh s Curse were revived.
Serious archaeologists were surprised that so much popular in
terest greeted this discovery, which had done no more than fill
up a small gap in comparatively recent Egyptian history, while so
little could be beaten up for far more interesting, ancient and beau
tiful discoveries in the Mesopotamian cities of Ur, Nineveh and
Carchemish, and in the Indus valley. The fact was that Tutankha
men, who had succeeded his revolutionary father-in-law the Phar
aoh Akhenaton, seemed somehow to embody the modernist spirit;
whereas the Mesopotamians were boringly ancient. Even Sir
Leonard Woolley s discovery at Ur of evidence for the local truth
of the Flood Legend did not hold anything like the overwhelming
significance that it would have held for the Victorians. Bible-read
ing was out of fashion.
Recreation now became increasingly hard work, as late hours,
mixed drinks and too much percussion wore out the poor little
rich girl of Noel Coward s song, and her partners. The new key
word was Disillusion not the Byronic melancholy and the Sor
rows of Werther which had been in fashion after the Napoleonic
Wars, but a hard, cynical, gay disillusion. It needed a poet for its
Il6 AMUSEMENTS
expression, and there was T. S. Eliot waiting. His Love-Song of
J. Alfred Prufrock and Preludes struck just the right note:
Tor I have known them all already, known them all
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee-spoons.
And
Wipe your hand across your mouth and laugh!
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.
His The Waste Land , which first appeared in the Criterion in
1922, was read by the side-burned aesthete to a large gathering at
Oxford in Eights Week in the following year through a mega
phone.
Man has conquered , was the wearied recreationalist s view,
but he has also failed. The old barriers are down, but the road
that now lies open for him is no longer enchanting. Man has flung
away his chains, but misses their comforting clank. It is all very
well for the working man who has his job and his struggle for
existence to distract him from such questions, but for the leisured
modernist what remains?
This was the opportunity for the Catholic Church to make
converts. In a relative world the Catholic point of view seemed
far wiser than most, because it had been developed throughout the
centuries until logically unassailable granted the original hy
potheses, which were no more fantastic than most. As soon as the
surrender was made, all problems were over: one was not allowed
to think for oneself. A great many university aesthetes, Mayfair
people, and middle-aged cynics were now jocularly reported by
their friends to have embraced the Scarlet Woman 7 : Evelyn
Waugh, the Oxford and Mayfair arch-playboy and most gifted
novelist of the new Disillusion ( Vile Bodies, A Handful of Dust,
etc.); G. K. Chesterton, the elephantine paradoxist; the Hon. Evan
Morgan, a leader and inspiration of the Bright Young People. The
same report was constantly being made of T. S. Eliot himself, but
he clung with a poet s conscience to a modicum of liberty for
thought, and would go no further than Anglo-Catholicism: it was
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he who eventually supplied, in The Rock and Murder in the
Cathedral , the spiritual plays for cathedral performance which the
1922 Church Congress had demanded.
Modern woman was held by psychological novelists to be ripe
for the same sort of surrender. Gifts of Sheba by W. L. George, a
typical advanced novel of 1925, had for its hero Hallam, a sadistic
sensualist who got a kick out of making Isabel, an earnest feminist,
happy by destroying her ideals, after first coolly murdering her
earnest invalid husband. For Isabel he was a sort of vice, something
unpleasantly seductive and forbidden, slightly nauseous but the
only man who had ever aroused her curiosity . He looked con
tentedly at her, in the last chapter. By Jove, life has made some
thing of her. Taken the sociology out of her, smashed up a few
of her ideas and made her what she ought to be a woman to be
enjoyed by a connoisseur. He told her: You re a modern woman.
You can t love properly as the beasts do, and they re the only
creatures that know. You can t live with strong men, because
you re damned if you re going to be ruled; and you can t live with
weak men because you re damned if you re going to be bothered
to manage them. ... The only kind of man the modern woman
can live with is the kind that doesn t care a damn for them. He
yawningly declared that he didn t care a damn for her; and she
fell into his embrace. Of course, Hallams to whom weary feminists
could surrender were few, but when Feminism is not Enough
became the right thing to say, there was neo-Victorianism to play
at, and Leftism.
Meanwhile the denunciation of modern youth was a permanent
Press feature. The Daily Express came out in 1925 with a bitter
attack on The Modern Girl s Brother . He was said to be weary,
anaemic, feminine, bloodless, dolled up like a girl and an exquisite
without masculinity; he resembled a silken-coated lap-dog, but
it is not suggested that he is sexually depraved .
The Prince of Wales, however, was held up to this poor wretch
as a shining example of manly behaviour. His activities as the
travelling salesman of Empire filled a very great number of
columns in these years. After the war, he had gone m turn to the
United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Photographs
of his tour and of his life on the battleship Renown filled the pic-
Il8 AMUSEMENTS
ture papers. The public came to look upon him as the hope of the
future though perhaps a somewhat enigmatic one. His speeches
at banquets, with their diffident, humorous touches, were fully
reported. When he was thrown at a steeple-chase and broke his
collar bone, it was sporting news and letters were written to the
Press, asking whether his riding should not be stopped in the
national interest ; when he wore shorts at a Norfolk beagles meet
ing it was fashion news; when he walked under an arch of artificial
silk stockings during a visit to a factory, it was really democratic
news. He became a symbol of industrious, go-ahead youth, fully
acquainted with all the world s problems; having, it is true, no
plan by which to solve them, but at least a determination to tackle
them and to struggle through, and thoroughly entitled to whatever
harmless recreation came along. He occasionally danced at the
Kit-Kat night club, and that was forgiven him: thirty peers were
known to be members.
County Cricket never aroused such popular interest as League
Football: it was wearisome to watch, rain frequently stopped play,
the wicket was too far away and the ball too small and fast for
spectators to catch the finer points of the game. Nevertheless in
the summer months the Press had to rely largely on cricket to
provide drama for the Silly Season. In 1925, for instance, there was
the drama of Jack Hobbs the Surrey veteran: would he beat W, G.
Grace s long-standing record of one hundred and twenty-six cen
turies in first-class cricket? He made 266 at Scarborough in a
Gentlemen-versus-Players match; 215 at Birmingham, playing for
Surrey against Warwick; and other centuries followed until he
had notched one hundred and twenty-five in all. Then in late July
and August came a lull in his scoring: match after match was
played and no more centuries made. But at last on August iyth,
at Taunton in a match against Somerset, Hobbs began to score
again. During the match newspapers carried excited headlines:
Will Hobbs Do It? , Within 9 of that 100 , and finally Bravo
Hobbs! as he reached his 101. In the second innings he made a
second 101, so passing Grace s record. The King sent him a con
gratulatory letter. Altogether that season he made 3,000 runs, in
cluding sixteen centuries.
AMUSEMENTS 119
But fine journalistic drama was provided by the Test Matches.
ENGLAND IN PERIL and CAN WE AVOID DISASTER?
were usual headlines. Even non-cricketers felt themselves person
ally involved in the fortunes of their country.
Social columnists gave considerable space to the crazes which,
in the early Twenties, swept not only Society but the wider pub
lic, too. There was first the motor-scooter, spelt in American by
one firm of manufacturers: Motascoota . With this vehicle, it was
prophesied, the birth of an entirely new era in locomotion is about
to take place . In the future, scooter-ways would be constructed
on either side of roads. The motor-scooter, however, was expen
sive to run and unreliable in performance: its doom was sealed
when Sir Philip Sassoon took a bad toss by confusing stop-lever
with accelerator. Shortly afterwards Sir Philip bought an aeroplane
and took to hedge-hopping.
Then there was the pogo-stick. This was a pole with a cross-
piece at the bottom on which to put one s feet; the upper part of
the pole was grasped with both hands; at the bottom was a strong
spring which enabled one to progress by jumping. It was described
in the autumn of 1921 as a new French toy . Newspapers came
out with headlines and pictures of a Stars Pogo Race Mona
Vivian and Reginald Sharland having raced each other down the
streets on pogo-sticks outside the Hippodrome Theatre. The Daily
News then running a children s feature of which the hero was a
spectacled boy named Japhet inaugurated a pogo-stick cham
pionship for members of the Japhet Club. It was won by a boy
from Cliftonville who did 1,600 hops in fifteen minutes, and cov
ered six hundred yards in eight minutes.
A less strenuous craze was Mah-Jong, a Chinese game which,
like ginger and the Pekinese, had once been a prerogative of exalted
rank. It was played with chips and domino-like counters and had
a terminology full of quaint chinoiseries. People excitedly called
Tung , Ching , and Bong when they completed particular sets,
and talked mysteriously of the East Wind , the North Wind
and the Red and Green Dragons . Mah-Jong came from the
United States in 1923; by Christmas the West End stores were
full of expensive sets, and several Mah-Jong handbooks were pub
lished. Instruction in the newspapers consisted of such advice as:
120 AMUSEMENTS
Don t forget to say "mah-jong" very quietly and with a restrained
air. The moral effect is doubled/ And: Don t either lie or speak
the truth consistently.
Then crossword puzzles. This craze was noted in the United
States in 1923, the puzzles appearing at first in books. At the end
of 1924 very easy ones, under the name of crossword squares ,
began to be printed in the British Sunday newspapers. Soon after
wards the dailies followed suit. From the woman s chat page in
The Bystander for December 1924: A quite fairly citing life after
all more especially since you don t know when you re going to
be cat-burglared next. Or be asked to solve one of these crossword
puzzles that re making life such a miserable burden for us all. (Cat-
burglars did not force ground-floor doors or windows, like ordi
nary burglars or policemen, but, like policemen raiding night-clubs,
scaled waterpipes, ran along roofs, appeared suddenly through sky
lights. They greatly brightened crime.) Punch commented in the
same year: The allure of Epstein and Oxford trouserings has been
for the few; the Crossword Puzzle captivated the many. (Jacob
Epstein was a modernist English sculptor who by 1925 had been
forgiven his unglorious military career, and was commissioned to
execute a memorial to W. H. Hudson, the novelist-naturalist. In
May 1925 Stanley Baldwin unveiled this: on the plaque was a
flight of odd-looking birds and in their midst a female figure, Rima,
the wild genius of the forest from Hudson s Green Mansions.
Rima was declared unworthy to commemorate Hudson s memory,
and unworthy to be exhibited in a public park. Attacks on her
were made not merely in the newspapers; periodically during the
middle Twenties gangs of unclever young men attempted to tar
and feather her or smother her in green paint. An old portraitist,
the Hon. John Collier, in a speech at the Authors Club described
Rima as a bestial figure , and Sir Frank Dicksee, R.A., registered a
formal protest.)
A simple type of crossword prevailed at first; as it grew popu
lar, immense prizes were offered for solutions and for new puzzles.
The odds against winning the prizes were higher than they seemed,
for the puzzles were so constructed that alternative words could
be used in many cases, and only the arbitrary combination selected
by the editor won. Possibly the craze would have died out in
Britain, as it did in the United States, had not serious weeklies and
AMUSEMENTS 121
academic journals borrowed the daily crossword and crossed it
with the old-fashioned acrostic making use of literary allusions,
anagrams, puns, and every kind of indirect reference. Thus started
a stream of different crosswords, which ran parallel to the daily
stream and helped to keep it flowing. For three or four years the
weeklies kept the different puzzle going, and when the reader of
the dailies became bored with filling in spaces with obvious words,
the dailies took it over in all its tortuousness. Mr. and Mrs. Every
man were found equal to it. Crosswords held their own throughout
the Peace because people had become genuinely interested in
words: solving the puzzles was an amusing way of improving one s
education jigsaw puzzles and Patience had led nowhere. Now
everyone knew that ERNE meant a sea-eagle, that RA was an
Egyptian God.
In 1922 the craze was for a simple gambling device known as
Tut and Take . It was a small six-sided top which players, after
putting money into a pool, each spun in turn; and then acted ac
cording to the order printed on the side that lay uppermost when
it fell put one more coin to the pool, or two or three; or took one
or two; or took all. People spun their tops on luncheon table, on
the bars of pubs, on the covers of magazines in railway carriages.
For a few months scarcely a home was without its top, then sud
denly the game entirely ceased. The simpler the craze, the more
universal its scope, and the swifter its end.
CHAPTER NINE
Screen and Stage
Cinema development had been remarkably slow between 1900,
when Moving Pictures were merely a novel side-show at the
Crystal Palace, and 1910. The pictures, popularly known as the
shakies , moved all right, but so spasmodically that even a two-
reel show would give most people a headache. And as an American
writer drily remarked: There s no Art for Art s sake in the movies :
they were made on the cheap and, apart from one or two news-
films of processions and crowd-scenes, dealt only in the crudest
farce and melodrama. But a little before the war pictures grew less
jumpy, though the cracking of the celluloid film after half a dozen
showings still made them look as if they had been acted in pour
ing rain; and the first big pictures Griffiths The Birth of a
Nation (starring the sylph-like Lillian Gish), and his episodic In
tolerance , showed the possibilities of screen drama. A boom then
started in British picture-houses, but public interest was intermit
tent: most of the smaller ones were continually passing under new
management for lack of patronage, and many reverted to their
original status of church hall, gymnasium, concert-room, or
shop.
The turn came in the spring of 1915, a very gloomy stage of
the war, when Charlie Chaplin was introduced to Britain as the
greatest laughter-maker of our time . Though the Press reported
with disgust that he was a young Englishman who was not doing
his bit , he soon won enormous popularity among the troops at
camp-kinemas with his custard-pie comedies. They sang of him
on route-marches:
122
SCREEN AND STAGE 123
4 Oh, the moon shines bright on Charlie Chaplin-
His shoes are cracking
For want of blacking,
And his little baggy trousers they ll need mending
Before we send him
To the Dardanelles.
His anti-German Shoulder Arms 7 restored him to official favour,
and he was the main cause why half the population of Britain in
1919 went to the pictures twice a week. His female counterpart
in glory was the world s sweetheart , Mary Pickford. The weather
had no effect upon attendance at the picture palaces: even during
the hottest summer evenings of this Year of Victory queues formed
as early as 6 p.m. most shows started at eight o clock, like theatres.
Newspaper readers were soon pleased to learn that picture-
going had become the settled habit not only of the working classes
but of respectable theatre-goers: West End cinemas were visited
by scores of the nobility and many members of Parliament, and the
venerable Queen Alexandra frequently gave exhibitions at Marl-
borough House. On the izth August 1919 a moving picture was
exhibited in the House of Commons to nearly two hundred mem
bers. It was an American exposure of the evils of Bolshevism, pro
jected from the first portable machine to be used in England.
The new dramas, which formed the bulk of cinema programmes,
were admittedly not much class ; but to see photographs really
moving about on a screen was still such a novelty that audiences
were uncritical. Clara Kimball Young appeared as a Tarzan girl in
The Savage Woman found by a French explorer in Africa,
brought to Paris, and introduced to European ways. In the end
she fled back to the jungle, dissatisfied with being regarded merely
as a curiosity and not loved for herself. Then there was Riders of
the Purple Sage . William Farnum, as the star, rode out to find his
married sister, who had been kidnapped by the Mormons and
hidden in the wilds of Mormondy. By the time he arrived, how
ever, she was dead. Undisconcerted by this disaster, he fell in love
with a Mormon girl and adopted a Mormon orphan. Together the
three escaped, but not to civilization: they shut themselves in a
secluded, primitive valley, where they were left to live happily
ever after.
Improvements in photographic technique encouraged greater
124 SCREEN AND STAGE
care in the details of interior, and the beauties of exterior, scenes.
The public enjoyed the new travel pictures, their knowledge of
geography having already been broadened by the war. These often
took the form of travelogues lectures illustrated by moving pic
tures, such as Lowell Thomas s With Lawrence in Arabia and
Allenby in Palestine , which was given before vast crowds at
Covent Garden and initiated the great Lawrence legend which was
to last for another fifteen years. (Lawrence, by the way, insisted
that Lowell Thomas had not spent more than ten days or a fort
night in Arabia during the war: and even those at the Akaba base.)
Many semi-religious and instructional films were also made, to
encourage those who had hitherto looked upon going to the cinema
as sinful.
Even the stickiest British families seemed ready to abandon their
mistrust of the cinema, if the vulgar American scene could only
be replaced by a wholesome British one. The London Mercury
held that: The cinematograph drama might become genuine art,
because one can look through the generality of the photograph
into the human imaginative synthesis. The high-brow attitude
had for some time been one of disdain: photography was compared
with painting, to its obvious disadvantage. When painting was
taking on highly dynamic forms, photography, even motion
photography, seemed to offer a very impoverished reality. But
the macabre German Ufa films of the early Twenties The Cab
inet of Doctor Caligari , Warning Shadows , Doctor Mabuse
and the charming silhouette picture Prince Achmed , removed the
prejudice. A high-brow Film Society was founded in 1926 for Sun
day performances at the New Gallery Cinema.
The full technical development of the cinema had clearly not
been reached with the silent film. Already in March 1919 the
Spectator had reported an invention which would supply the
human voice simultaneously with the spectacle of human beings
in dramatic action/ It was not the old plan of synchronizing a
gramophone record with the film: that had been proved ineffective.
The new invention consisted in recording the human voice on a
sound-track attached to the film. We cannot foresee/ observed the
Spectator, peering uneasily into the future, the effects upon the
methods of the film-star. If the appeal is not to be only to the eye,
there will be a slump in the value of facial contortion/ The hit was
SCREEN AND STAGE 125
a just one: the early film-star usually grimaced at his audience like
someone trying to convey news of terrific importance to a stone-
deaf and half-witted child.
It was at first thought that there was a great future for British
films. In 1919 a British production company with 1,000,000
capital was launched, and it was confidently asserted that the great
fight between British and American films was about to begin. In
1920 Britain produced over two hundred pictures and though
at the same time American production was running into thousands
annually, Hollywood had just celebrated the twenty-fifth anni
versary of the film industry by declaring in favour of fewer and
better pictures. British critics took this for a sign that the sources
of American film plots were drying up: that would never happen
here. And once the technical side had improved with the help of
all this money, British audiences would respond with proper en
thusiasm to comedies in which trains were familiar British trains,
without negro waiters or cow-catchers, and in which policemen
did not wear hats like busmen or swing clubs about. Many of the
new British pictures would be semi-factual reconstructions of war
themes, on heroic lines, dealing with the battles of Mons, Coronet,
and the Falkland Islands, the blocking of Zeebrugge and the ex
ploits of Q-ships. The American could not compete here!
These bright hopes for the British film industry, however, had
begun to fade in 1922: the picture palaces were still crowded, but
American producers had taken to selling their pictures to European
exhibitors in blocks if one good or grandiose picture was wanted,
many indifferent ones had to be bought at the same time. The one
good picture was beyond the scope of British producers; picture
palaces were already booked up with indifferent American ones;
and British producers could no longer find enough exhibitors to
justify their attempting anything grandiose after making a pic
ture they often had to wait two years before recovering produc
tion costs. Meanwhile American film companies were buying up
the cinema-houses and tightening their hold still more. Several
British producers went out of business even the bold expedient
of bringing over American stars to work for them failed. Questions
were then asked in Parliament and it was agreed that something
should be done to stem the tide of American pictures. In November
1923 the Prince of Wales inaugurated what were called British
T26 SCREEN AND STAGE
Film Weeks , in which British films were to have the preference
on British screens; but the American producers forestalled this
move by flooding the market beforehand.
The Germans were held up as models for British producers to
imitate: during the war they had built up a successful film indus
try, protected from American competition, and since the war they
had erected huge studios and were producing films that rivalled
the American in technical excellence and cost far less to make. By
1924 they had got a firmer foothold in the British market than the
British themselves. The German actor Emil Jannings became a
world star. Several British firms went to Berlin to make films, but
even this did not save them. The industry was dead again by the
end of the year. Then American money drew to Hollywood most
of what was new or active in Germany; and in Britain began re
placing the old picture palaces, which had originally been designed
for some other purpose than film shows, with functionally designed
luxurious cinemas to seat several thousand people. Already cinema
organs, at a cost of about 3,000 each, were being installed to sup
plement the orchestras. Even the poorest cinema at this time pro
vided its own music: usually an ex-music-mistress who vamped a
piano, hour after hour, and tried to suit the melody to the mood
of the film. Entrance fees were higher where there was a fiddler as
well.
In 1922 began the system of showing pictures at trade-shows,
where cinema managers decided whether to book or not and where
newspaper critics came to write reviews. Often a year elapsed be
tween the trade-show and the general release, by which time peo
ple had forgotten what the film critics had written about the pic
ture. The Daily Mail was the first paper to announce that it would
no longer publish criticisms of trade-shows and thus give managers
free guidance in their choice, but would review films that were
actually showing and thus guide the public instead.
No remarkable experiments in film-technique were made in
these years but there was a continuous improvement in production
gestures growing less jerky, settings less improbable, the connec
tion between sequences smoother; and one no longer had to wait
for a minute or two every time one reel was removed from the
projector and another inserted. An unsolved difficulty was that of
sub-titles these were words flashed periodically on the screen be-
SCREEN AND STAGE 127
tween shots, or at the bottom of shots, to explain the immediate
action. Different parts of the audiences read at different speeds;
the quicker readers grew impatient with the slower, and the slowest
of all never got to the last words before these vanished. In 1923 a
film was shown that did without sub-titles; it pleased the film-
critics but not the mass of film-goers, who could not make out
what was supposed to be happening. Besides, sub-titles were great
fun: audiences would read them aloud in an appreciative under
tone. Such quaint Americanisms, for instance, as Beatrix Esmond
goes nix on the love-stuff , when she registered haughtiness and
stamped her foot, and TouVe dribbled a bibful, Baby when some
Keystone Baby had given her Sugar-Daddy useful advice, were
widely quoted. Sub-title writers, even in Britain, were known as
Came-the-Dawners, from the more romantic part of their calling.
The morals of the film story were at first under no control in
the United States; but in 1920 the women s clubs and the Churches
began a nation-wide drive against sexuality in films. The big Amer
ican producers were forced to formulate the usual fourteen points
it had always been fourteen since President Wilson s peace
terms gave the number a mystic ring covering the sort of pictures
which they pledged themselves not to make. Two years later the
Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Company was formed,
with Will Hays, a former Postmaster-General, as President; its
purpose was not only to look after the practical interests of the
cinema industry but to exert moral control over the films released.
In the same year the London County Council prepared the way
for an official film-censorship by ruling that no children should be
permitted to see films which did not bear a Universal license; for
young criminals had a stock plea in court I saw it at the movies.
The movies were blamed for a great many disagreeable innovations,
from the film-star behaviour of domestic servants to the lowering
of white prestige in the East by American crook and sex-dramas.
But Britain was less strictly treated by its censorship than the
United States, where, for example, Middle Western influence in
sisted on a nonsensical sub-title to Chaplin s Woman of Paris :
giving the heroine a legacy from an aunt to conceal the disgraceful
fact that she was the kept mistress of the hero, Adolphe Menjou.
This was the golden age of pictures, between their first quaint
beginnings and their eventual streamlining as Big Business. The
128 SCREEN AND STAGE
public was developing a cinema-sense : now that the pictures were
no longer a novelty, they began to learn the difference between
good and bad. The boos which at first were reserved for the villain
in the Western or crook drama were sometimes awarded to the
dullness and stupidity of a block-booked film, made for American,
not British, hicks. Audiences rather liked the short educational
films introduced in 1921, the Goldwyn-Bray Pictographs, which
showed the growth of plants, the behaviour of insects and so on,
and even reproduced authentic life in north-west Canada and the
wilder parts of Australia. In the following year short travel-films
came in; consisting usually of a dull succession of only slightly
moving views, interspersed with jocular or poetical comments.
Later these merged into story-films with naturalistic settings:
Nanook of the North in 1924 showing life in an Eskimo com
munity, then Trader Horn with West African scenes, and in 1927
f Chang , over which the most serious journals grew lyrical. The
Spectator declared: "Chang" is a magnificent film. The cinema
has here brilliantly fulfilled a part for which it is better fitted than
any other artistic medium. No book, painting, musical impression,
or circus could give so adequate and vivid a picture of the jungle.
And it is hardly a picture but a slice of the actual life of a Siamese
tracker and his delightful family. They live in a log hut built on
stilts, with a tame monkey, Bimbo, as the family jester. And around
the solitary homestead leopards prowl, stealing by night the goats
on whose milk Kiu s children depend, until the last goat is sacrificed
as a bait to catch this ruthless marauder in a trap. There are snakes,
ant-eaters, large scaly lizards, bears, tigers, and monkeys galore in
this labyrinth of sinister-shaped trees and interwoven undergrowth.
At one time a herd of elephants some hundred I should think
are driven by fearless natives into a kraal. . . . The picture of
this jungle life is not only conveyed by the film but also by the
sounds of the different types of animal characters who appear,
which have been recorded in the Zoological Gardens/
The sexual attraction of an actor or actress was an increasing
draw. Hysterical scenes took place when the most famous screen
lover of the day, a smooth-faced young Italian, Rudolph Valentino,
died. Half the female population seemed to be his widow. His
romantic performances in the screen versions of E. M. Hull s The
Sheikh and The Son of the Sheikh made the word sheikh , pro-
SCREEN AND STAGE 129
nounced to rhyme with shriek , a synonym for the passionately
conquering male. In 1927 a journalist wrote of an actor who was
performing Nelson in The Divine Lady : With an arm missing,
and blind in one eye, he still managed to have sex-appeal. Sex-
appeal was a new word with a tremendous vogue; it passed whole
into most European languages. It was another word of the same
sort invented that year by the novelist Elinor Glyn: meaning the
fascinating magnetic quality which her heroines, and Cleopatra
and most cats and one or two of her cosmopolitan heroes pos
sessed. It meant being slinky and mysterious, for slinkiness was
the leading erotic quality of the early post-war years: the Kirch-
ner flapper whose scantily draped limbs and kittenish face, cut
from illustrated papers, had brightened nearly every dug-out in
France, had set the slinky fashion, and the Vampire or Vamp ,
Theda Bara, had confirmed it. In the Thirties It gave place to
Oomph , a more vigorous sex-appeal Clara Bow, the tempera
mental red-haired comedienne, was really an Oomph , not an
It , girl.
The most popular departure in the Twenties from ordinary
film-technique was the animated cartoon. The adventures of Felix
the Cat were what the public really went to see, shouting out, to
the accompaniment of the picture-palace piano, the famous ballad:
Telix kept on walking, kept on walking still. Felix was a black
cat with a few touches of white who walked with his hands behind
his back through nightmare landscapes and was totally inde
structible. Even after calamities of dynamite, sharks, earthquakes,
and lightning his scattered limbs always reassembled like mercury.
He had a habit of detaching his tail and sending it off on adventures
of its own. The limitless craziness of Felix, and of the manikin who
came Out of the Inkwell in a series combining realistic photo
graphs with the cartoon, was popular education in that suspension
of ordinary time-and-space values which the new physics had en
joined on scientists. Far more fantastic things happened to Felix
than to his slick successors, the Bonzo dog and Mickey Mouse; and
his departure from the scene about the time that short skirts reached
their ebb-tide level and turned again marked the end of an age.
Westerns were the picture palaces surest stand-by: they had
hard-riding, tough-guy heroes like Hoot Gibson, William S. Hart,
and Tom Mix with his wonderfully trained horse. Then there were
130 SCREEN AND STAGE
ambitious romantic dramas, featuring the athletic and debonair
Douglas Fairbanks (The Thief of Baghdad , The Man in the Iron
Mask , The Black Pirate , Robin Hood ), with duels, rescues, and
hair-breadth escapes. There were personal love-dramas, too, with
Gloria Swanson, the first film-actress to marry into the French
nobility, and Bebe Daniels, who made screen history when she
had her Hittite nose Grecianized by plastic surgery in the interests
of her art. Everyone loved Lon Chaney, the master of disguise,
whose most famous role was Quasimodo in The Hunchback of
Notre Dame . It was a joke, when one saw a black-beetle scuttling
along the floor, to cry: Don t kill it; that may be Lon Chaney in
disguise. Everyone also loved The First Dog Star , the Alsatian
Rin-Tin-Tin, who saved his master from a thousand deaths by
super-doggish intelligence and a fine set of teeth. But the best that
British producers could show was a not really successful costume-
drama, The Glorious Adventure , staged at the court of King
Charles II, and including one hundred and thirty principal players
among them Lady Diana Duff Cooper.
Next to Felix and the Westerns in popularity came the Ameri
can slap-stick comedies with the gross Fatty Arbuckle; the spec
tacled Harold Lloyd in comically appalling situations; the unsmil
ing Buster Keaton receiving jam-tarts plumb in his eye and tidily
wiping away the jam; the Mack Sennett bathing beauties. But
Chaplin remained The King of the Silver Screen : by far the most
popular film in the Twenties was The Kid , a mixture of farce
and sentiment, in which Chaplin as a lonely tramp found and
brought up an orphan child, Jackie Coogan. The drama lay in their
enforced separation and happy reunion. Enormous interest greeted
Jackie Coogan when he visited London in 1924: the first child-
wonder of the screen The hero of Nine who is Unspoilt . He
came as the representative of American children who had raised a
million dollars for relief work in the Near East, and was greeted
like a Crowned Head. Later Chaplin himself came to London be
tween films and was followed about by gigantic crowds. When he
visited Sir Edwin Lutyens s studio in Appletree Yard, a cul-de-sac
near St. James s Square, a corner tobacconist chalked up on his
board Charlie is Down the Yard . The streets for a quarter of a
mile around were solid with sightseers. Chaplin was no longer
merely the funny little man with the baggy trousers arid the stick:
SCREEN AND STAGE 13!
The Kid 5 and The Gold Rush had made him emblematic of the
gay spirit of laughter in a cruel, crazy world. But the laughter grew
more and more painful and satirical as the years went on and
Chaplin had domestic troubles; and when the Marx Brothers came
along with their irresponsible haywire comedy in the Thirties he
seemed by contrast a rather seedy old Socialist with a message.
The theatres had come to believe that the cinema held no real
threat for them: the human voice and the actor in the flesh would
always prevail over dumb shadows. Theatre rents, owing to sub
letting of leases, were absurdly high at first, but even the f alling-off
in attendance at the beginning of 1921, when a coal-strike had
made the theatres too cold for comfort, did not worry the man
agers; the autumn season was very successful. There were phe
nomenal runs. Paddy, the Next Best Thing , a sentimental Irish
comedy, completed its third year, and Chu Chin Chow , a
grandiose pseudo-Chinese drama, which had started during the war,
ran for nearly five years, and achieved a since unapproached record
of 2,238 performances. There were also crook-dramas such as
Bulldog Drummond and problem plays in the tradition of Brieux
and Ibsen. The leading serious dramatists were pre-war favourites:
earnest, puzzled John Galsworthy, and argumentative, always-right
Bernard Shaw Shaw s plays were the stand-by of the Hampstead
Everyman Theatre, the only repertory theatre in London. And
above all J. M. Barrie, whose annual Peter Pan was the making
of each young actress chosen to star in it, and whose Dear Brutus
and Marie Rose transcended the logic of facts with the same
briny-sweet whimsicality.
Theatre-going was now again a social obligation, like church-
going, and revivals were the fashion. The extraordinary success of
Gay s The Beggar s Opera , under Sir Nigel Playfair s direction,
which had a more than three years run at the Lyric, Hammer
smith, encouraged the resurrection of a number of forgotten Eliza
bethan and Jacobean plays Ford, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher
by the Phoenix Society. Oscar Wilde s comedies, the Gilbert and
Sullivan operas, Box and Cox , and Charley s Aunt were all
brought out for an airing, to see what they looked like in a changed
world. They looked very well. Charley s Aunt provided a stunt
in 1921 for raising money for ex-Servicemen. Two characters from
it, Lawyer Spettigue and Lord Fancourt Babberley (disguised as
132 SCREEN AND STAGE
Charley s Aunt) ran a race at the White City. In spite of bad
weather a large crowd gathered to see it. The Daily News reported
the event in full: Lord Fancourt Babberley s skirts tripped him up
in the first twenty yards, and Mr. Lawyer Spettigue s valuable top-
hat fell off. So a start was made again to the tune, as before, of
quite a hundred toy trumpets. On the runners now went, the skirts
having been more tightly gripped and the top-hat pushed well
down, and behind went the great crowd. In the Boxing Arena
"Babs" was very nearly caught, his skirts being unmercifully
tangled in the ropes; but the two strange figures ran on to the
finish, where poor perspiring Spettigue lost by "five lengths" (offi
cial), and the honour of Charley s Aunt was completely vindi
cated. . . .
There was no Shakespeare revival in the West End, but the
Birmingham Repertory Theatre advertised a new fashion when
it produced Cymbeline in modern dress. The Britons wore eve
ning dress at Court and in the daytime lounge suits; in the war
scenes they were put into khaki. Cymbeline himself appeared as a
field-marshal; the Queen and Imogen wore Paris frocks; the Ro
mans, Italian uniform. Belarius in the cave-scenes was a modern
sportsman with a shotgun. When the fighting started he and his
two charges became Australian officers.
Many foreign plays and players arrived in 1923. The legendary
Duse appeared in England for the first time for seventeen years.
There was a Sacha Guitry Grand Guignol season; Carel Capek s
R.U.R. , and Eugene O Neill s daring Anna Christie played by
an American company. New British plays included Somerset
Maugham s Our Betters , which the public found shocking and
unpleasant.
The hit of 1924 was Shaw s Saint Joan , with Sybil Thorndike
in the leading role. Dame Sybil came to identify herself so closely
with the part that later, when she commissioned Jacob Epstein
to do a head of her, she is said to have annoyed him by assuming
a Saint-Joan-like, heavenward look. When Shaw was asked why
he had written the play he said that it was c to save Joan of Arc
from John Drinkwater an indefatigable historical playwright,
and director of the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, whose Abra
ham Lincoln had been one of the great stage successes in 1922.
Saint Joan won the Nobel Prize for Shaw that year; it had gone
SCREEN AND STAGE 133
to W. B. Yeats in 1923 and was to be won by Galsworthy in 1932.
The other play of this season was the rural novelist Eden Phill-
potts comedy The Farmer s Wife . It was something simple and
clean to take one s aunt or mother to, and was constantly revived
for this purpose throughout the period.
Such younger dramatists as Frederick Lonsdale and Noel
Coward found it difficult at first to get a hearing, for the easily
offended stalls ruled the box-office. Coward s The Young Idea
had only a short run in 1922: and when The Vortex was moved
from the Everyman to the West End in the autumn of 1924, the
drug-taking son and the immoral mother in the play seemed far
too sympathetically presented. It aroused what was known as a
storm of protest , but the publicity was useful and Coward helped
things along by releasing a photograph of himself in bed, wearing
a Chinese dressing-gown in a scarlet bedroom decorated with
nudes, his expression being one of advanced degeneracy. He fol
lowed up the success of The Vortex with Fallen Angels . Its
subject was attacked in the Press as vulgar and obscene, the Daily
Express describing the women characters as suburban sluts ;
Coward received a sackful of abusive letters. His Sirocco caused
another storm in 1926: from the stalls came cries of rotter , and
from the gallery cat-calls and shrieks. Handsome Ivor Novello,
author of Keep the Home Fires Burning , was playing in it and
his film-fans were disappointed at seeing him in so unattractive a
role. But Coward was now rapidly taking his place as the leading
British dramatist: his light touch, perfect timing of laughs and
quick anticipation of modern tendencies had been learned on the
stage itself. He had been an actor since childhood and gained as
shrewd a knowledge of the limitations of actors and audiences as
Shaw himself. He could also write good lyrics, set them to catchy
tunes and sing them pleasantly; and gave most of his plays a start
by taking the lead himself in 1927 he had four shows running
simultaneously.
Perhaps the most typical play of the middle Twenties was Miles
Malleson s Fanatics , first published in volume form in 1924. So
daring was it that no producer could be found for it until 1927,
when it was put on at the Ambassador s. The Observer s verdict
was: Mr. Malleson remains the .undergraduate of dramatists, and
when he writes a play we know we are in for one of these deep
134 SCREEN AND STAGE
discussions of freedom with which men in their first year fill their
evenings "freedom" meaning looseness of behaviour accompanied
by an entire lack of intelligence. However, the play ran for nearly
a year. James Agate summarized it fairly in the Sunday Times:
The upshot of the argument is that Age cannot do right or
Youth think wrong. . . . No doubt as to the author s bias in the
matter. Mr, Freeman s dining-room is described as "middle-class
but sumptuously so: he is rather short and rather round, a little
red, a little bald. He continues to eat his fruit there is no other
sound". It is obvious that Freeman and the class for which he
stands are in for a thin time.
Young Freeman, the son, is revolted at the notion of 500 a
year in wholesale ironmongery and a partnership when he marries.
He has had five years [sic] in the trenches, realizes that there is
something rotten in the state of post-war England, and deems it a
cursed spite that he should be chained to his father s office when
he has bright ideas for the regeneration of the world. John is a
muddled thinker in whose airy book-keeping the fact that Eng
land is still England and not Germany is not even an entry. To
war s debit he places not only the fact that stay-at-homes like his
father prospered exceedingly, but also a number of things which
cannot by any possibility be brought into the account. There s that
old matter of monogamy. How can a fellow know that in one
woman he will find both soul-mate and mistress? The remedy is
trial marriage, with birth-control until the parties are satisfied that
their attachment is lasting. Immoral? John sees nothing moral in
a system whereby an epileptic woman in a slum can have twelve
children by a confirmed drunkard, and thousands of babies roll
about in filth. "Religion doesn t do anything, because it thinks
birth-control wicked; Big Business doesn t do anything, because
it wants cheap labour; the Government doesn t do anything be
cause they want soldiers for the next war." John has a sweetheart
to whom marriage is largely a matter of window curtains and
dinner parties. John, wanting assurances which are not forthcom
ing, takes a mistress. John also has a sister who is so far bitten by
his doctrine that, having secured a lover who wants to marry her,
she will not consent until she has made the experimental trip. The
sister s young man has a friend who has made three such voyages,
declares herself a famous sailor, and is all in favour of this par-
SCREEN AND STAGE 135
ticular ocean-going experiment. Huddled over John s gas-fire in
the dead of night they talk each other and the audience blue in
the face. In the middle of their abstractions and hypotheses is
thrown a bombshell of accomplished fact the housemaid is going
to have a baby, and all through waiting at table and listening to
their silly talk. The father is a married man and what are they all
going to do about it? John stammers that he will help her finan
cially. But as his father has thrown him out of the business, and
his future income is dependent upon the sale of pamphlets on trial
marriage, we do not quite see how.
The Twenties did indeed temporarily raise the mental age of
the average theatre-goer from fourteen to seventeen.
Frederick Lonsdale s Spring Cleaning was another successfully
abused shameless play of the Careless Twenties; so were drama
tizations of Michael Arlen s The Green Hat, with Tallulah Bank-
head, and Anita Loos s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. This was the
time when any successful novel immediately became a stage suc
cess too. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was a best-selling American
story of two kept women and their gentlemen friends, told in art
less pseudo-baby language; The Green Hat was about people com
mitting suicide for purity s sake when devoured by sexual passion.
Arlen was cynical, daring, and ruthless . The Weekly Dispatch
in May 1925 quoted from him in illustration of the perfect amusing
style: Lady Surplice was relentless in her generosity and indomi
table in her indiscretion , and Mrs. Amp was as mean with money
as a Temperance Hotel with matches, but even so she could stay
the stars in their courses, anyhow for at least five courses, and
then make them sing and dance to her guests on top of it.
Tallulah Bankhead, about whose private life as many fantastic
stories were current as about Noel Coward s, was an American
actress with an attractively husky voice and a large forehead.
When she took the lead in The Green Hat something new hap
pened: in the old days there had been male matinee idols such as
Forbes-Robertson and Gerald du Maurier, whom schoolgirls raved
about, just as there were female ones whom schoolboys raved
about. But the craze or Schivarmerei of women theatre-goers for
an actress was something hitherto unknown in Britain and Tallulah
soon had a bigger fan-mail from women than any male rival. The
Press increased the vogue by featuring The Hysterical Gallery
SCREEN AND STAGE
Girl . Another Queen-bee (the contemporary American word for
the object of such a craze) was Edna Best, heroine of Basil Dean s
dramatization of The Constant Nymph. This was a novel by Mar
garet Kennedy, the great success of 1926, which described the
doings of a musician named Sanger and his Bohemian family:
none of them with any moral sense except where instrumental
music was concerned. The principal scenes were set in the Austrian
mountains; and the heroine died just in time to avoid technical
adultery. This play started a fashion for Austrian dresses and Aus
trian summer holidays, and finally reconciled the suburbs to
Bohemia .
Coward was the dramatist of disillusion, as Eliot was its tragic
poet, Aldous Huxley its novelist, and James Joyce its prose epic-
writer. They all had in common a sense of the unreality of time.
The main theme of the revues that Coward wrote for C. B. Coch-
ran was that one now knew a little too much for happiness; and
that this was a period period, without a style of its own any
longer, but with full liberty to borrow from any wardrobe of the
past. His songs World- Weary and Dance, Dance, Dance Little
Lady were felt to reflect the mood of his time. A typical Cochran
revue scene: the contrast between a Victorian and a neo-Georgian
wedding night. In the first, the young bride, unaware of the facts
of life, howls miserably for her mamma, and the husband is embar
rassed but stern; in the second, the couple feel the springs of the
bed, pronounce them all right, and make it quite clear that this is
by no means their first sexual encounter.
C. B. Cochran was the leading showman of the period and the
best liked. He sometimes made large sums of money on his ven
tures, as often went broke by misjudging the British capacity for
taking it , but would always find backers for something new. He
was a chief link between the United States and Britain, Cochran
lost thousands on Russian ballets, brought Balieff s Chauve-Souris
from Paris (not a success), introduced American cowboy rodeo
(crabbed by the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Ani
mals), promoted a number of big prize fights, dropped 20,000
on a single revue, earned as much on others, introduced the many-
ringed Circus at Olympia, made his Young Ladies into the best
revue-chorus of the day. Cabaret, straight plays, musical shows
there was nothing Cochran did not touch: only he shrank from
SCREEN AND STAGE 137
what was dull and safe . He had once been a struggling trouper ,
and the recklessness, generosity and good comradeship of the Stage
distinguished him from most of his fellow showmen, whose chief
interest was finance, not entertainment.
Edgar Wallace was by far the best-known and most widely
read low-brow writer, and a successful dramatist too. He had been
a journalist before the war and even when he became a popular
novelist did not lose touch with Fleet Street. In 1926 he was edit
ing the Sunday News and writing topical weekly articles. In 1927
he was racing correspondent for the Star as a result the Star s
circulation rose considerably and in 1930 he was dramatic critic
for the Morning Post. His pre-war novels had been set in Africa;
but after the war he settled down to producing ordinary home
thrillers. He worked with notorious industry in a hot room, all
windows shut, smoking cigarette after cigarette through an im
mensely long amber holder, drinking every half -hour a cup of
sweet, weak tea, pacing about in a dressing-gown, dictating to his
secretaries. In this way he was able to complete a book in four
days; the plots were shaky, but the style vigorous. During the last
six years of his life he died in 1932 twenty-eight of his novels
were published and it was a joke to ask at a bookstall for the mid
day Wallace . At the same time he was writing plays. 1928 was
an Edgar Wallace year in the theatre, three of his plays, The Man
Who Changed His Name , The Squeaker , and The Flying Squad
being produced in the West End at the same time. In addition he
did the book for a musical comedy, The Yellow Mask , and put
on a suburban production of The Lad . All these plays were
straight, old-fashioned melodramas situation piled on situation,
with increasing suspense, the dialogue racy but not clever.
Wallace s standard of living was about the same as Bottom-
ley s had been. He kept a racing stable and a box at Ascot; betted
frequently and not very wisely; played poker with less skill than
imperturbability; gave parties of roast lamb, ice-cream, and cham
pagne to the casts of his plays. In 1930 he decided to stand as Lib
eral candidate for the Aylesbury Division of Bucks, and began to
open Liberal bazaars all over the constituency. He told his audi
ences that he wanted to enter the House of Commons because a
writer of crook stories ought never to stop seeking new material .
Aylesbury was a Conservative constituency, however, and he did
138 SCREEN AND STAGE
not make much progress; a year later he withdrew his candida
ture. In 1931 he went to Hollywood to take up scenario-writing,
his ambition being to become a film-director. But already he was
suffering from diabetes and in 1932 he died of double pneumonia.
The film King Kong , on which he had been working, was fin
ished after his death.
The healthy, light American musical comedy was popular in
the Twenties: No, No, Nanette in 1925 was followed by Tip
Toes and Lady Be Good , distinguished by the dancing of the
Astaires Adele had not yet married into the peerage, nor had
Fred become No. i World-Hoofer on the films. The heavily
romantic, improbable, low-brow spectacular play still drew enor
mous crowds; as did its cinema counterpart. The Desert Song in
1927, starring Edith Day, was the most famous of these; it was the
Sheikh period and the scene was therefore Morocco, where a
French general lived in a palace fitted out like the most luxurious
of Turkish baths. His son was considered a good-for-nothing and
had failed in love; to escape from this failure he became the mys
terious Sheikh of the Riff Arabs, The Red Shadow . The Shadow
abducted Miss Day, gave her a Paris frock in the Riff mountains,
forced back her head on an ultramarine cushion, kissed her. Com
plicated adventures followed, the Shadow being torn between
love for Miss Day, loyalty to the Riffs, and loyalty to his father
and to France. In the end everything came right, with the help of
an American war-correspondent, who supplied comic relief, and
the wives of the Foreign Legionaries, who all wore Paris frocks
and hats.
CHAPTER TEN
Revolution Again Averted, 1926
The rise of the Labour Party to respectability was an important
feature of the immediate post-war period. At the Khaki, or Coupon,
Election of December 1918, the party slogans had been: Peace of
Reconciliation , Hands off Democracy , Land for the Workers ,
A Million Good Houses , A Levy on Capital , Nationalization of
Railways, Mines, Shipping, Electric Power . Even in that Hun-
hating and Lloyd George-cheering year, the programme had a
wide enough appeal to secure 57 seats and 2,250,000 votes. Labour
was also winning municipal elections, where seats would often be
unexpectedly snatched because of the apathy of Conservative and
Liberal voters. In 1912 there had been only 46 Labour councillors
in the London boroughs; by 1919 there were 572, with a clear
majority in twelve boroughs.
At first the question of Russia divided the Labour Party. A 1919
conference could not easily decide whether to support or oppose
British intervention on the side of the Whites. The British work
ing-man tended to think of the Russians as foreigners rather than
fellow working-men. Philip Snowden, an ex-Fabian, denounced
the Reds as wanton revolutionaries and Colonel John Ward, the
Navvies M.P. , who had himself served at Murmansk, supported
him with tales of Red atrocities. But it was clear that no good could
be done, and much harm, by identifying Britain with the Tsarist
cause, and the conference finally voted against intervention. In
1920 London dockers refused to load the freighter Jolly George
with munitions for the use of Poland, which had been invaded by
the Russians, and Labour came out solidly in their support. Later,
the Jolly George incident was often cited by Left extremists as an
example of how the action of the workers could thwart the aggres
sive designs of the Capitalists against the U.S.S.R.; but it had made
140 REVOLUTION AGAIN AVERTED, 1926
no real difference to the result of the Russo-Polish War the Rus
sians found that, unaccountably, the Polish proletariat did not rise
to welcome the Red Army, and the Polish forces, recovering
bravely from a first setback, defeated them.
In 1920 the General Workers Union, the National Union of
General and Municipal Workers, and the Amalgamated Engineer
ing Union, each absorbed several small craft-unions. Early in 1921
the powerful Transport Union was formed. Labour s policy at this
time was given in a manifesto: We of the Labour Party . . .
recognize, in the present world catastrophe, if not the death, in
Europe, of civilization itself, at any rate the culmination and col
lapse of a distinctive industrial civilization, which the workers will
not seek to reconstruct. . . . The industrialist system of capitalist
production . . . with the monstrous inequality of circumstances
which it produces and the degradation and brutalization, both
moral and spiritual, resulting therefrom, may, we hope, indeed
have received a death-blow. . . .
This difficultly worded prophecy of woe, to which were added
methodistic hopes for a righteous and equalitarian future, had
little effect on the working class until the slump of 1921 recalled it.
Meanwhile, the indefatigable Socialist historians, Beatrice and Sid
ney Webb, were trying to persuade intellectuals and manual
workers alike, in Labour and the New Social Order, and numerous
other books and pamphlets, that the war really had brought about
the end of the old era, but that only the Labour Party on a Fabian,
no-class-war programme could decently inaugurate the new.
The Labour Party made a virtue of refusing affiliation to the
Communist Party of Great Britain, which was formed in 1920 by
the union of three ginger groups the British Socialist Party, the
Socialist Labour Party and the South Wales Socialist Society, They
accused the Communists of taking their orders from Moscow and
plotting to stab Labour in the back though, in fact, the Commu
nist Party at that time was too small to be dignified with such
notice, and showed no signs of getting any larger. The social gap
between the British governing and governed classes had narrowed
greatly since Karl Marx s day, and nobody could think of the class-
war that he had prophesied except as a figure of speech. Yet the
class-war as it had been waged in Russia was real, and the Bolshe
vists were undeniably Socialists; and for Labour to be in any way
REVOLUTION AGAIN AVERTED, 1926 141
associated in the popular mind with a massacre of the nobility and
gentry was most damaging to its cause. In the upper classes anyone
who merely visited Russia, such as Claire Sheridan the sculptor
(whose Russian Portraits, published in 1921, was not at all pro-
Bolshevist), was socially ruined; a Balliol undergraduate and ex-"
officer, who went there for his vacation, was asked to leave the
college on his return. Two other undergraduates were subsequently
rusticated for Russian Communism . For, according to the Con
servative Press, the Bolshevists were not only murderers and ruffians
and enemies of private property: they were also active atheists and
had nationalized women for sexual purposes .
In 1921 Labour showed its heroic side. The Poplar Borough
Council, with a Labour majority, withheld payments due to the
London County Council, as a protest against the saddling of im
poverished local bodies with the whole burden of poor relief.
Most of the council, among them George Lansbury of the Daily
Herald, were then imprisoned for contempt of court. They de-^
clared themselves Guilty and proud of it . They were, however,
soon released: it was realized that their protest was justified, and
legislation was rushed through to distribute the incidence of relief
more evenly among the rich and the poor boroughs. The Poplar
Councillors victory was an important one, since nearly all the half-
million people then drawing relief quite a distinct payment from
the national dole lived in a few poor boroughs, which conse
quently found their revenues grossly overstrained.
Early in 1922, with the object of further underlining Labour s
repudiation of all things Russian, J. H. Thomas, the leader of the
railwaymen, sued the editor of an obscure paper, The Communist,
for libel: The Communist had accused him of betraying the miners
interests in the strike of that year. The court proceedings were
hilarious. Thomas and the officers of the Law together enjoyed
themselves at the expense equally of parliamentary procedure and
of Bolshevist behaviour. The Daily News reported these extracts
from the Court dialogue:
Mr. Thomas: No two Parliamentarians use the same words to
convey the same meaning. (Laughter.)
Serjeant Sullivan (defending) : That is, my Lord, what is called
finding a formula. (Laughter.)
His Lordship: I think it perfectly priceless.
142 REVOLUTION AGAIN AVERTED, 1926
Mr. Thomas: . . . My complaint is that I am not accused of
being a traitor to the Communists, but of being a traitor to the
Trade Unionists/
His Lordship: Am I to understand that The Communist is kept
going by the capitalist? (Laughter.)
Mr. Thomas: I have no hesitation in saying that Russian money
at the moment is subsidizing the Communist movement.
Serjeant Sullivan: The rouble is extremely depreciated.
Mr. Thomas: But the jewels have gone up in value. (Laughter.)
This was the time when the Russian Government was hastily
raising funds by selling abroad confiscated jewels and works of
art. The case, which Thomas won, was a great reassurance to those
who had been encouraged to believe that Labour intended Red
ruin and despoliation.
Later in the year, Ramsay MacDonald was elected leader of the
Labour Party. He had been in disgrace during the war as a pacifist,
and even forced to resign from his local golf club; but by 1922 this
was counted rather a feather in his cap. At the Party Conference
in the following year he and Sidney Webb came out firmly in
favour of the inevitability of gradualness , the futility of violence ,
and the spirit of fellowship preached by William Morris . This
moderate line won them enough seats at the General Election of
1923 to undertake a government with Liberal support, as has
been described. A Labour government was a great joke for the
popular Press: what, for a start, would the Cabinet Ministers wear
at Royal levees? The King obligingly relaxed the rule that they
should wear black knee-breeches and white silk stockings. A great
wave of delighted relief was felt. So a Labour Prime Minister could
kiss the King s hand upon taking up office, without the need for a
revolution a man too who had come up from the very bottom,
and was not even born in wedlock! All was well, after all. And
Sidney Webb had consented to become Lord Passfield what a
joke! and, richer still, his wife had refused to be Lady Passfield,
out of combined feminist and socialistic conviction, and remained
Mrs. Webb how funny that would look when they registered at
hotels! Soon J. H. Thomas, who had spent many years as an engine-
driver, became a well-loved figure of fun as Colonial Secretary,
because of his undisguised love of evening dress and cigars: Low
saluted him as The Rt. Hon. Dress-Shirt ,
REVOLUTION AGAIN AVERTED, 1926 143
Thomas had for private secretary the art-and-poetry-loying
Edward Marsh, a famous first-nighter , who had previously served,
in turn, Campbell-Bannerman, Asquith, and Winston Churchill.
Eddie and Jimmie were said to have struck up a warm friendship.
It pleased the Press to find that there were touches about the new
Ministers, such as MacDonald s long moustaches, which could be
made as endearing as Joe Chamberlain s monocle and orchid, Bald
win s pipe, or Churchill s hats. Better still, the new hostess of 10
Downing Street was the Prime Minister s daughter, Ishbel Mac-
Donald, then aged twenty. Reporters were sent to find out whether
she was a typical example of the modern girl . She described No.
10 as *a nice place, but awfully complicated , and said that she was
studying at the Domestic Science College. Reporters tried to draw
her out, to see if they could represent her as a less serious girl than
this suggested. She admitted a fondness for music, hockey, and
golf, and for a really thrilling tragedy like The Mill on the Floss*.
I ve never been centred in a whirlpool of jazz and I do not intend
to be, she announced. This comforted many readers. So did Snow-
den s budget, which omitted to impose the dreaded Capital Levy
and did nothing more newsworthy than provide a Tree Breakfast
Table by reducing the import duties on tea, coffee, sugar, and
chicory.
The fact was that Labour had only been able to count on Lib
eral support if, in Asquith s phrase, its claws were cut ; it cut its
own claws by including in the Cabinet the former Liberal War
Minister Lord Haldane, and Lord Chelmsford, an ex-Colonial
governor. But it had by no means an easy time. Strikes continued:
one among the transport-workers in London and one among the
builders of the forthcoming British Empire Exhibition at Wembley.
Ramsay MacDonald had to invoke the Emergency Powers Act,
that sinister instrument of Capitalist tyranny , as the Daily Herald
had called it, to deal with the situation; J. R. Clynes, as Home Sec
retary, declared in a speech at Wembley that Labour had been
converted from its former grooves to the wider view . The wider
view meant, of course, behaving like any other Ministry. When,
for instance, Arthur Henderson dared to speak of revising the Ver
sailles Treaty, MacDonald at once repudiated him. In foreign, as
in domestic policy, MacDonald was obliged by his Civil Servants,
if not by his own inclination, to follow a Conservative line, espe-
144 REVOLUTION AGAIN AVERTED, 1926
cially in his severe dealings with nationalistic movements in British
possessions and dependencies overseas.
When MacDonald boldly denounced the French for endanger
ing the peace of Europe by their occupation of the Ruhr, he was
expressing the general trend of British public opinion. It was re
called that at the Washington Naval Conference of 192 1 the French
had, for prudential reasons, refused to agree to the abolition of
submarines and of military aircraft. In the popular Press the French,
rather than the Germans, were now the villains of Europe: accused
of exploiting the Allied victory to their own advantage. Lord
Birkenhead, the famous barrister, politician, and Orangeman, even
went so far as to suggest that the French were preparing for war
against Britain; nor was this view thought fantastic France was
Britain s hereditary enemy, and had twice nearly been at war with
her over the near-Eastern question within living memory.
Certainly the French were exploiting the victory. For while
the British (who, unlike the French, had not had their country in
vaded twice in the last fifty years) decided to further their own
trade by magnanimously helping in the reconstruction of Ger
many, the French feared that economic reconstruction might also
bring about the revival of German ambitions. The Hitler-Luden-
dorff putsch at Munich in 1923, though a fiasco, showed that the
Germans had not yet been reduced to complete docility. This revolt
was provoked by the catastrophic fall of the German mark, when
the occupation of the Ruhr put a lien on Germany s chief remain
ing wealth. By the winter of that year the mark was quoted at
fifteen million to the sterling, and its fall shook the franc down
from sixty-seven to ninety to the . The British then grew wor
ried. A Daily News special reporter, sent to Bavaria to investigate
the causes of unrest, poured scorn on the Hitler movement, but
went on to say: Hitler, the tub-thumping patriot, may be heard
from again some day. It is not generally known that this man, who
is an Austrian by birth and a sign-painter by profession, was badly
gassed on the British front. Previously he had been badly wounded,
but after he recovered from the gas-attack he stated he had seen a
vision and received a message. He had been summoned as the
Saviour of Germany!
In 1924 the French had a change of government; and of mind,
if not of heart. Obviously, Germany s capacity to pay would be
REVOLUTION AGAIN AVERTED, 1926 145
reduced to nothing if her currency continued so fantastically in
flated: for all industry and trade would cease. Collaboration was
essential, even from the strict point of view of making Germany
pay . The Radical Herriot, who replaced Poincare as Premier,
found himself in close sympathy with MacDonald. In August 1924
the Ruhr was evacuated and a period of collaboration between the
Allies and the moderate Germany of Stresemann seemed about to
begin.
It was ironical that what brought about the end of Labour-
Liberal co-operation was the Anglo-Soviet Treaty, by which
Britain first recognized the U.S.S.R. Labour meant this only as a
formalization of the commercial amity already existing between
the two countries. For in 1921, despite the question of the repudi
ated Tsarist debts to Britain, Sir Robert Home, on behalf of the
Coalition Government, had signed a trade agreement with the
Soviet representative Krassin; and a Soviet trading office, Centro-
soylus, had been opened in England. Russia was a promising cus
tomer for British goods, and it was considered wise to cut our
losses before the Germans captured the market. The Labour
leaders were therefore surprised at the self-righteous Liberal oppo
sition to the Treaty, which had been recommended in the interest
of trade and industry by permanent officials of the Civil Service,
and had no ideological 7 significance. They were no more shaking
hands with murder than the Liberals themselves in 1921; and now
that Russia seemed on the way to becoming a great power once
more, it was in the oldest British tradition to recognize the fact
diplomatically, Besides, if it came to that, the U.S.S.R. was at least
the equal, morally, of pre-war Turkey or Tsarist Russia. But the
Liberals were resolved to escape the odium of having thrown
Britain into the arms of Russia . They withdrew their support from
Labour in the House and another General Election followed at
which Labour was stabbed in the back not by the Communist
Party, but by hands unknown.
On 2ist October, only eight days before the polling date, the
Foreign Office issued to the Press an intercepted letter purporting
to have been written by Zinoviev, the President of the Third In
ternational. It was addressed to the Communist Party of Great
Britain, whom it urged to stir up the masses, sow propaganda among
the troops, and keep a careful watch on Labour leaders who
146 REVOLUTION AGAIN AVERTED, 1926
tended to betray their class by straying into the folds of the bour
geoisie. The Russian Treaty, the letter asserted, would help to
revolutionize the proletariat as much as a successful military rising.
This letter, which the Daily Herald at once proved by internal
evidence to be a clumsy forgery, put MacDonald into a cleft stick.
He doubted its genuineness himself, but dared not prevent the
Foreign Office, who pretended to believe in it, from lodging an
immediate official protest with the Soviet Charge d Affaires: for
to do so would be represented as a condonation of treason. The
Russian Government passed on the protest to the Third Inter
national, a quite separate organization, which naturally repudiated
the letter. MacDonald had enormously underestimated the damage
that the publication of the letter would do him in the popular
Press. He saw only that it associated him and his colleagues with
the forces of Law and Order and might therefore be expected to
do more good than harm. But the Daily Mail played it up as irre
futable evidence of the Red Menace of which the Labour leaders
were being made the dupes; and the rest of the Conservative Press
unanimously maintained that a vote for the Liberals was a vote for
Labour, and a vote for Labour was a vote for the Communist Party.
This appeal to the passions overrode all considerations of fact or
probability the Communist Party in England was still neither
more powerful, numerous nor rich, than the Geoplanarian Society
whose members were bound together in the staunch belief that the
earth was really flat, or the Plymouth Brethren, or the Mormon
Church. Yet the middle-class electorate, forgetting how reassur
ingly J. H. Thomas had joked about Bolshevist jewels, how charm
ing a hostess Ishbel MacDonald had been, how gentlemanly had
been the parliamentary behaviour of even the wildest of the Wild
Men, rushed to the defence of the National Liberties. As a result
the Conservatives, who had wisely dropped tariffs from their pro
gramme, came to power with 415 seats. Labour polled a million
more votes than in the previous year, but chiefly in constituencies
where these were wasted. They could secure no more than 152
seats. The combined Liberals were the real losers; they kept only
forty-two. There was one Communist member, Saklatvala of Bat-
tersea, whose election indicated the seriousness of housing condi
tions in that depressed borough rather than any Marxian convictions
among the electors.
REVOLUTION AGAIN AVERTED, 1926 147
It was a glorious victory for the Tories too glorious indeed
for parliamentary health: never had the House been so full of in
experienced members. Baldwin was again Prime Minister. Winston
Churchill was Chancellor of the Exchequer reconverted from-
Liberalism to Conservatism, after having for the past two years tried
unsuccessfully to form his own Centre Party out of Asquithian Lib
erals and advanced Conservatives. His Budget in 1925 was a model
of orthodox finance. The Treasury had decided to reaffirm British
financial stability by a return to the Gold Standard at pre-war
parity. Though this meant an overvaluation of the post-war pur
chasing power of the , it was useful at the time in re-establishing
Britain s commercial position, which had been affected by the re
cent slump. The low rates at which France and Belgium would
stabilize their currencies, as a threat to British trade, were not then
foreseen.
This Budget was publicized as The Silk Stocking Budget be
cause of the tax it imposed on raw and artificial silk. There had
been an extraordinary increase in the production of artificial silk in
Britain. The first artificial silk process was Hilarie de Chardonnet s
in 1883, launched commercially by the Societe d Exploitation de
Soie Artificielle at Besangon. The results were unsatisfactory and
thirty years passed before improved British processes took the
squeak out of the new material and gave it the desired soft frou
frou. And it was not until after the war that the British output of
artificial silk showed a sudden increase: in 1919 it amounted to
35,000,000 lb.; in 1922 to 80,000,000 lb.; in 1926 to 235,000,000 lb.;
and in 1928 to 341,000,000 lb.
The Bolshevist bogey, that had brought the Government into
power, was kept alive by frequent exercise. Sir William Joynson-
Hicks, the Home Secretary, denounced Red Gold as the insidious
instrument by which the National Minority Movement of Tom
Mann and Harry Pollitt worked to corrupt Trade Unions from the
inside. A boycott was in force among many M.P. s against Saklat-
vala: he was to accompany a delegation to the Inter-Parliamentary
Union Conference in the United States in August 1925, but three
M.P.s refused to be delegates if he were included, declaring that
they loathed and detested his utterances. At the last minute the
United States Government cancelled his visa, and all was well.
A leading occupation of this rather hysterical time was making
148 REVOLUTION AGAIN AVERTED, 1926
forecasts. In 1924 J. B. S. Haldane inaugurated the famous To-day
and To-morrow series of booklets published by Kegan Paul with
his Daedalus, or the Future of Science. A good idea of what 1925
was really like can be deduced by an analysis of its Futures. A
typical orthodox one, for the next twenty-five years, was Sir Sid
ney Low s article in the Daily Mail Year Book. As a Conservative
journalist he felt it his duty to emphasize the peril of Bolshevism:
Russia might choose before long to repeat the menace of Genghiz
Khan and pour its Asiatic hordes upon Europe. But in Central
Europe there would be peace: the French and Germans were now
showing hopeful signs of collaboration.
- Sir Sidney prophesied great changes within the British Empire.
Ireland would become an independent republic; Canada would be
absorbed into the United States merely out of unwillingness to
be mingled in European affairs. India would be a loose federation,
governed more by independent princes than Bengal orators, and
the British would have withdrawn to the coastal towns, as in the
early days of the East Indian Company. Britain itself would have
contracted its interests, and would no longer be a great world-
trading power. He also prophesied that within the next twenty-five
years there would be tele-pictures as well as wireless (nobody had
yet coined the equally mongrel word television ). People would be
able to fly by aerial saloons to New York in twenty hours, and
spend week ends in Tunis and Tangier as easily as in Torquay. The
open fire and the smoking chimney would be abolished. Everyone
would be using electric heaters, electric baths, electric cleaners, and
electric cookers. (By everyone he probably meant everyone who
matters socially ; this being the abbreviation used in the popular
Press throughout the period.) Wireless transmitters would be car
ried in people s pockets like cigarette-cases, and medical research
would have prolonged the normal span of life to a hundred years.
At the same time, Sir Sidney reflected sombrely that in the next
twenty-five years some new Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, or Lenin
might arise to make a new Europe and shatter all that was left of
the old one. Optimists believed that the Powers would agree to
disarmament, and that disputes could be settled by the League, but
realists would expect a few more wars though not a world war
like the last. These wars would be terrible but short; no longer
REVOLUTION AGAIN AVERTED, 1926 149
would millions of infantrymen sit in trenches for years the fight
ing forces would consist of small bodies of highly trained air
men, engineers, chemists, and mechanized artillerymen. Movements
would be rapid, and a campaign might last no more than a few
weeks. A limited number of professional combatants, like the stand
ing armies of the past, would replace the nation-at-arms.
In this concluding item, which did not square very well with
his Russian hordes fantasy, he was making a resume of the views
of the Morning Post military correspondent, Captain Liddell Hart,
who had written in September 1924: Pure numbers, as military
history teaches us, do not constitute an effective army, and the
more the means of war develop, the more does this truth hold good.
. . . The tank is not so much a weapon as a rapid and cross-country
means of moving weapons. Since we have centuries ago replaced
man s arms by mechanized arms rifles, machine-guns, and guns
it seems but the logical course of evolution to replace his legs by a
mechanical means of movement. . . . With the development of
long-range artillery and bombing aircraft it is difficult to see how
long, slow-moving columns of infantry could continue. Captain
Liddell Hart, as military correspondent successively to the Morn
ing Post, Daily Telegraphy and The Times, continued for the next
fifteen years to plug his message: Mechanize everything. Not to
increase our tank force in order to keep cavalry and infantry is a
suicidal policy. The reception given to his views was quite warm
at first. An early convert, General Sir George Milne, Chief of the
Imperial General Staff, in an address to the officers of the newly
formed Experimental Mechanized Force at Tidworth (September
1927) promised whole armoured divisions and remarked: Crowds
of men are out of place on the battlefield, when you have low-
flying aeroplanes against them. Think of their communications and
supplies!
The popular Press was pleased with the idea of mechanization:
it was possible now to save 4,500,000 a year on the Army esti
mates. Nevertheless, it seemed almost unnecessary to argue about
the Army and its weapons: they would surely never be needed
again in the era that was now dawning. For in December 1925 the
Locarno Pact had been signed between Germany, Italy, France,
and Britain. Briand, the French Prime Minister, had said: We are
150 REVOLUTION AGAIN AVERTED, 1926
now only Europeans , and Sir Austen Chamberlain, then Foreign
Secretary: These treaties are the real dividing line between the
war years and those of peace.
The stage being thus cleared for former belligerents to fight
the war again in friendly debate, the Daily Express published an
article by the German Admiral von Tirpitz, who claimed that the
Battle of Jutland had been a German tactical success. The German
ships were superior, von Tirpitz said, and the training of their men
perhaps a little better. The prolongation of the war, he concluded,
was due to the failure of British seamanship to force a victory. Lord
Jellicoe defended himself against this charge by accusing the Ger
mans of withdrawing before he could make his superior numbers
felt; in any case the German Fleet had never again tried conclu
sions with the British. Then Admiral Mark Kerr declared a little
irrelevantly that the Germans had suffered many more casualties
than the British, because the action had taken place at night. The
United States semi-official naval historian was invoked to prove
that the British failure to win a complete victory had allowed the
Germans to keep their submarine routes open, and so contributed
to the U-boat campaign of 1917 which almost won them the war.
Finally the Finnish attach^ to the British Fleet gave his opinion:
German ships and guns were qualitatively superior.
At this point the editor of the Daily Express stepped in to call
for an inquiry: These statements cannot go unchallenged or un
heeded. The truth is infinitely more important than naval reputa
tions. If the British Fleet could have forced a decision, let us know.
If our strategy was at fault, let the public be told. This was rather
the Drily Mail line than that of the Drily Express, which was de
scribed by the judicious Lord Morley as that huge engine for keep
ing discussion at a low level .
Various experts sent their views to the Express. Commander
Kenworthy (later Lord Strabolgi) asserted that the British Fleet
had been, and still was, defective in its air-arm. Admiral Sir Regi
nald Bacon in reply disparaged the usefulness of aircraft to battle
ships. Vice-Admiral Sir Cecil Lambert held that von Tirphz s state
ments were on the whole justified: British ships had been inade
quately armoured against German naval shells. The editor then
again intervened, demanding whether errors in armament had now
REVOLUTION AGAIN AVERTED, 1926
been made good. Nobody answered him, however, and the contro
versy faded into discussions of whether aircraft could sink battle
ships, and Is the Battleship Doomed? This was the beginning of
the debunking era: the word debunk being shortly afterwards
introduced from the United States, meaning to remove the false
glory from famous reputations especially war-time ones. -"
As international news brightened, domestic affairs took a turn
for the worse. The movement which resulted in the General Strike
of 1926 had been maturing for some time. Labour was irritated by
the prospect of five years of Conservative rule, won by what
seemed a dirty trick. The Daily Herald, which had not yet become
the respectable organ of the T.U.C., had recently increased its cir-
culation by railing against injustice, sneering at the dignified follies
of the Law-and-Order party, and cheering on every strike in Great
Britain and every fight for freedom by the oppressed masses of the
rest of the world. It never preached or countenanced violence, but
was read earnestly by the more thoughtful and emotional worker
and was largely responsible for a feeling that everyone should, in
the Utopia promised by science, literally mean everyone.
The housing shortage was still severe, the unemployment figures
were high, and so was the cost of living. Then in July 1925 the
Government subsidy to the coal industry came to an end. The
mine-owners, in view of the continued low price of coal, gave
notice that they intended to reduce wages, abolish the minimum-
wage principle, and enforce longer hours. The Miners Union and
the T.U.C. took this as a challenge to declare the class-war that
they had now heard so much loose talk about, chiefly from Con
servative papers. They threatened a coal and railway strike if the
mine-owners carried out their intentions. The Government there
upon appointed a commission under Sir Herbert Samuel to investi
gate industrial conditions; and meanwhile continued the subsidy.
The Samuel Commission condemned subsidies, recommended that
hours should be left as they were but that wages should be reduced,
and proposed the collective selling of output and the closing of pits
which did not pay their way. The mine-owners were constrained ,
to accept this report. The miners rejected it with the slogan Not a
minute on the day, not a penny off the pay , and were supported
by a great number of other unions. The general feeling among
REVOLUTION AGAIN AVERTED, 1926
working men was that Labour ought to show its gigantic combined
power, for once: not to punish, or destroy, but just as a warning
that there were certain things that it would not tolerate.
The Government then prepared to face the threatened general
strike. An Organization for the Maintenance of Supplies was
formed, and volunteers were enlisted from the middle and upper
classes. The Labour Party could not make up its mind what to
do. Its official policy had been explained in a pamphlet, The I.L.P.
and the Nation , published at the end of 1925: The Labour Party
pursues a co-ordinated policy of National Reconstruction and re
form which seeks, by Parliamentary means and progressive stages
... to develop the material and mental resources of the nation.
And Ramsay MacDonald had declared that Socialism is the idea of
the political state acting more and more in co-operation with the
industrial state. But this general strike thoroughly alarmed the
Labour Party. Though it sympathized with the miners and, in fact,
represented them in Parliament, yet to support them in a move
ment that might lead to the overthrow of parliamentary govern
ment seemed suicidal.
On April 26th the miners ceased work. Though the General
Council of the T.U.C. declared that it would give them the fullest
"support, J. H. Thomas pleaded for moderation. To talk at this
stage, he said, as if in a few days all the workers of the country
were to be called out, is ... letting loose passions that might be
difficult to control. . . . Instead of organizing, mobilizing and en
couraging the feeling that war is inevitable, let them concentrate on
finding a solution honourable and satisfactory to all sides.
The Government, having completed its warlike preparations,
rejected the last-minute offers of the miners delegates. To start
negotiations at this stage would seem like yielding to intimidation.
The T.U.C. then announced a general strike for May 3rd, to in
clude all workers except those engaged in public health services.
The day was awaited like a prophesied End of the World.
It came. In London extraordinary things happened. All union
labour went on strike. The Stock Exchange was feverish. Hyde
Park was closed to the public and used as a milk depot. Troops
were stationed in Whitehall, and employed in convoying food.
Public transport ceased completely trains, omnibuses, trams, even
taxis. But non-union business carried on, and thousands of office
REVOLUTION AGAIN AVERTED, 1926 153
workers who could not cycle, or get a lift in the crammed private
cars, walked fifteen and twenty miles a day to and from suburbs.
Many firms engaged rooms for their staffs in neighbouring hotels.
The power plants were taken over by the Government, but illumi
nated signs were prohibited in order to conserve electricity supplies.
Fog added to the confusion. Soon amateur train, tram, and bus
drivers inaugurated a skeleton service. The material damage was
considerable: it was not only that the strikers broke the windows
of the scab vehicles, but that the amateur drivers mishandled the
engines from ignorance.
These were days of wild rumours, for the newspaper printers
had come out on strike even those of the Daily Herald. It was
perhaps a tactical error on the part of the T.U.C. to allow the Daily
Herald printers to come out, because the small daily sheet that
they published themselves, The British Worker, could not compete
against the news service of the Law-and-Order party. This in-,
eluded a Government broad-sheet, The British Gazette, run by
Winston Churchill; the Daily Mail, which was now printed in
Paris and flown over to England; other newspapers in very small
format; and above all the B.B.C. The Daily Herald rummaged
around for volunteer printers and managed to get out a daily quar
ter-sheet. The same news items, however, kept on appearing day
after day. The headlines were: Justice for the Miners: Labour s one
Aim . If it be War, so be it . Blame rests on Government . Beware
of the Wireless! The Government controls it! And: Bishops call
for Justice, Mercy and Humanity the Bishops of Winchester and
Southwark had called for a further subsidy to the coal industry,
because it was the very backbone of the body industrial . Christian
principles, they said, demanded further negotiations and not open
strife. Unfortunately, for lack of space, the Herald s leading articles
often broke off in the middle of sentences. The Bishop s appeal, for
example, faded out with: from the human point of view. . . .
The Daily Mail represented the extreme middle-class reaction to
the strike. On May 3rd it came out with headlines: The Pistol at
the Nation s Head , Great Menace to Free Press . The editorial,
headed Tor King and Country (the Daily MaiVs slogan), de
clared that A general strike is not an industrial dispute. It is a
revolutionary movement intended to inflict suffering upon the
great mass of innocent persons in the community and thereby to
154 REVOLUTION AGAIN AVERTED, 1926
put possible constraint on the government. . . . This being so, it
cannot be tolerated by any civilized government, and must be dealt
with by every resource at the disposal of the community. . . . We
do not wish to say anything hard about the miners. As to their
leaders, all we need say at the moment is that some of them are
(and have openly declared themselves) under the influence of
people who mean no good to this country/ This last phrase was
aimed particularly at the Miners Union secretary, A. J. Cook, who
was popularly supposed to be the reddest of Reds.
On May 5th, in a leader headed No Fumbling , the Daily Mail
quoted Wordsworth:
We must be free or die, who speak the tongue
That Shakespeare spake: the faith and morals hold
Which Milton held.
And again, on May 6th:
J Tis well! from this day forward we shall know
That in ourselves our safety must be sought:
That by our own right hand it must be wrought,
That we must stand unpropped or be laid low.
O dastard, whom such foretaste doth not cheer!
The well-to-do and the un-unionized lower-middle classes stood
unpropped fairly comfortably, with the help of emergency trans
port organizations, for the nine days that the strike lasted. They
rallied to volunteer services as they had rallied during the war; for
the B.B.C., which by now had about 2,000,000 regular listeners, and
the Law-and-Order Press, were persuading them to stand firm and
to do their bit .
On May 8th Sir John Simon, former Attorney-General and
Home Secretary, then out of office, ventured to declare the Gen
eral Strike illegal, on the ground that it was not covered by the
Act of 1906 which rendered Trade Union funds immune from
claims for damage caused by industrial disputes. Although Simon s
declaration was immediately contested by some legal authorities, it
startled and worried many Trade Union leaders. The unions had, at
the start, been by no means united in agreement on their general
policy, and MacDonald and Thomas had both declared themselves
against the principle of a general strike. A rift was growing between
REVOLUTION AGAIN AVERTED, 1926 155
the Miners Union and the T.U.G The miners had authorized the
T.U.C. to act on their behalf only so long as it refused to consider
wage reductions; but the T.U.C. was, in fact, already negotiating
with the Government s unofficial representative, Sir Herbert Sam
uel, about wage reductions. When A. J. Cook, for the miners, de
manded guarantees that the Government would carry out any
agreement reached by Sir Herbert and the T.U.C., J. H. Thomas
was reported as saying: You may not trust my word, but will
you not accept the word of a British gentleman who has been
Governor of Palestine?
The Government was dealing successfully enough with the dis
organization caused by the strike, the Labour leaders were waver^
ing, the Samuel proposals seemed promising; the T.U.C. therefore
called off the strike on May 1 3th. Nevertheless the dockers, printers,
and transport workers remained out, in disgust, for five more days,
and the miners for another six months. The Daily Mail headlined
the end of the strike: Surrender of the Revolutionaries , C A Tri
umph for the People , and declared more boldly than plausibly that
Zinoviev had planned the strike in 1918 and that five hundred Soviet
agents had fomented it. Dissolve the T.U.C. , dear out the
Soviets , the Daily Mail urged.
It was a great relief to get back to normal life, without blood
shed or starvation; but people in general wore a rather sheepish
look, wondering what it had really all been about, for bus and tram
conductors on their return were as polite and unwarlike as ever
and even Daily Mail reporters had discovered no secret revolu
tionary arsenals.
The miners came off the worst. That summer many of them
were reduced to a diet of home-grown lettuce and stolen mutton
from the hills. The coming of winter gradually forced them back
to work; groups of them sued separately for peace with the mine-
owners. Numerous poorer pits closed down for good, and unem
ployment among miners was so widespread that during the next
few years the population of South Wales alone decreased by 250,-
ooo : the more vigorous workers migrating to industries in other
parts of the country, or to the Dominions.
The Trade Unions philosophically recognized that they had
taken a beating; and their view was Never again! They did not
raise any strong objection when a new Trade Disputes Act, passed
156 REVOLUTION AGAIN AVERTED, 1926
in 1927, illegalized the General Strike. They decided instead on a
policy of co-operation with industrialists, and in September 1927
held parleys with a group headed by Lord Melchett, who directed
the important new chemical industry. As a result, a National Indus
trial Council was formed, with a joint standing committee com
posed of Trade Union leaders and nominees of the Federation of
British Industries and the National Conference of Employers. A
great number of workers, however, remained discontented and
suspicious. They believed that the Labour leaders had been bought
and that the Unions would now be used as instruments not for pro
tecting the workers but for dragooning them. A number of politi
cal idealists in the middle and upper classes were also disgusted with
the way in which the Law-and-Order party had muddied the
waters. The miners case had been a strong one and the Conserva
tives seemed to be using a fiction of class-warfare to goad a decent
and loyal people into insurrection. Talk about hanging the Kaiser!
Parliament is full of little unhanged Kaisers! This was how The
Left started: as a generous reaction against ungenerous reaction.
But before long it came to include every sort of minority opinion
in the country the muddled, foolish and ill-conditioned as well as
the young, healthy and hopeful.
Leftism the first recorded use of the word in the Press is by
H. G. Wells in 1927 was not a British but a Continental attitude.
In Continental legislatures the left curve of the Chamber, seen from
the President s chair, had been customarily assigned to the progres
sive parties, the right to the conservatives. In the British Parliament,
the Government whether Conservative or Liberal or Labour or a
Coalition sat on one side of the House with the Opposition facing
it across the gangway. The theory of Leftism thus ran counter to
British Parliamentary procedure; it simplified party politics into a
struggle between vested interests, hereditary privilege and bour
geois respectability on the one hand, supported by a few traitors
from lower ranks of society, and a united bloc of the independent-
minded and aggrieved people on the other. Old-fashioned British
Radicals had never made such an assumption, and their indignation
at the wrongs of the people had been expressed in a sincere and
amateur way, not organized according to Continental theories of
mass-psychology, as Leftism soon became. The Left saw themselves
as the intelligent Goats, unjustly relegated to this ill-omened posi-
REVOLUTION AGAIN AVERTED, 1926 157
tion by Old Nobodaddy, in favour of the self-satisfied and stupid
Sheep.
The Left soon became internationally minded. The first cause
that genuinely stirred their emotions was, strangely enough, not
a European but an American one the Sacco-Vanzetti affair of
July-August 1927. These two men, Red Italian immigrants, had
in 1921 been sentenced to death for murder by a Massachusetts
court. They were then allowed to live on from reprieve to reprieve,
because it was generally realized that there had been a miscarriage
of justice; yet the State Government did not wish to acknowledge
its error, and Governor Fuller, who detested Reds, finally decided
that no further appeal should be allowed. The drama of their fate
was prolonged. The case was reviewed, the State Supreme Court
denied the petitions; a new appeal, with the undertaking to provide
fresh evidence, was rejected; the prisoners were removed to the
death house in Charlestown prison. Liberal feeling in America was
deeply stirred, the more so as Charlestown prison stood within the
Bunker Hill battlefield, sacred to the cause of popular freedom.
An application was made to the Federal Supreme Court for a stay
of execution; the men were taken out of the death house until the
application should be considered. The Federal Supreme Court re
fused the stay of execution. Back to the Death House. Tinal
Appeal to President Coolidge. 5
Meanwhile, in most countries of the world, agitation against
this judicial murder was being worked up. The Communist Inter
national first protested to the United States Government. There
were demonstrations in Copenhagen, Berlin, Leipzig, Zurich,
Rouen, Paris, Nice, Basle, Geneva, Athens, Tokyo, Helsinki, and
many other cities, often with the use of bombs and revolvers, the
United States Consulate or Embassy being the usual goal of the
hostile crowds. In Britain the first protest was made by the Bristol
branch of the Communist Party; but early in August the Independ
ent Labour Party also took up the cause and addressed a telegram
of appeal to the President. On August 8th the Communists demon
strated in Trafalgar Square and marched in procession to the
United States Embassy. The police dispersed them, made arrests,
and secured exemplary prosecutions. Finally, the Trades Union
Congress also roused itself and sent a stern telegram to Governor
Fuller. Demonstrations were held in every important city and
158 REVOLUTION AGAIN AVERTED, 1926
town in Britain. The largest took place in Hyde Park on August
22nd. Perhaps 200,000 people attended and speeches were made
from several platforms. The Park was thick with mounted police
waiting amongst the trees to charge down on the unarmed crowds
should they attempt any breach of the peace. However, the general
mood was one of sympathetic agony, not bellicose ardour.
President Coolidge rejected the appeal and the men were exe
cuted on August 23rd. The physical shock of horror that the news
brought to millions of anxious homes cannot be readily conveyed.
There was nothing like it throughout the period. On the evening
after the execution a Memorial gathering was held in Hyde Park.
The mounted police had orders to take action at the slightest sign
of disorder in the crowd, which was large, sorrowful, and orderly.
Vanzetti s noble message of farewell drew sobs and groans when
it was read out.
The Daily Express reported next morning that twenty people,
including four women, were injured. At the close of the proceed
ings the crowds were dispersing after the meeting when somebody
suddenly started singing the "Red Flag". Hundreds of people
cheered and joined in, while uttering threats against the police. The
police charged and split up the crowd. The Daily Express felt itself
bound to disregard the matter editorially, for the police action was
generally felt to have been wantonly aggressive. But the New
Statesman commented:
Hundreds of thousands of people all over the world must have
greeted the news of the actual deaths of Sacco and Vanzetti with
a deep sigh of relief. We can at least be sure that, innocent or
guilty, their seven years of suffering and suspense are now ended.
The whole episode has been barbarous from beginning to end. It is
impossible to imagine its having happened in any fully civilized
country in any country, that is to say, in which civilization is
more than skin-deep. They ought, at the very least to have been
granted a fresh trial. So much justice, indeed, they might confi
dently have expected in, say, Moscow, or Belgrade, or Constanti
nople. In all respects the behaviour of the Massachusetts Court has
been abominable and inexcusable. Their system of justice is their
own affair, but if their methods lead to trouble in London, we are
certainly entitled to complain. There is grotesque irony in the fact
that the killing of these two Italians involved in the U. S. a display
REVOLUTION AGAIN AVERTED, 1926 159
of armed force such as no American citizen has ever before seen,
and in every European country a police mobilization costing huge
sums of money/
Further grotesque irony lay in the close agreement of the Com
munist Party, the I.L.P., the T.U.C, and the Radicals on this and
other foreign issues, but seldom or never on domestic ones. The
most unfortunate result of the affair was that the United States,
already regarded with suspicion and jealousy, as having enriched
itself at the expense of Europe*, and with contempt for its tolera
tion of gangsters and non-enforcement of Prohibition, became the
object of popular execration in Britain as the new home of
tyranny . This ill-feeling did not subside until the Roosevelt admin
istration, and was constantly fomented by fresh accounts of Amer
ican barbarity the Mooney case, the Scottsboro case, Southern
lynchings, and bloody strike-breakings in Pennsylvania and West
Virginia.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Domestic Life
By 1923 building materials had cheapened and the Government
subsidies granted to Urban and Rural District Councils were tempt
ing enough to set the housing boom gradually in motion. This
boom, which kept a great many trades occupied and benefited the
workers themselves by giving them comfortable homes to live in,
took another five years to get well under way; but was a great
steadying factor in national life. Builders of houses had to conform
to certain specifications of size, airiness and convenience before
they could earn the subsidy, and the sites had to be approved by
the district surveyor; the result was a great improvement in the
general health of the nation, a remarkable decrease in infant mor
tality, and the elevation of slum-dwellers to lower-middle class
rank by virtue of such amenities as gas, electricity, bathroom, and
water-closet. The Conservative papers joked at first about the uses
to which these unfamiliar baths would be put, but on the whole the
filthy habits of the slums were left behind with the foul air and
bugs and the communal earth-closet. Ruffianism in crowded trains
and buses, at places of public entertainment, and in public-houses,
grew most exceptional and if ever it occurred was likely to be put
down at once by some strong-armed champion of popular opinion
usually an ex-Serviceman. For the habits of discipline and clean
liness learned in the Army and Navy had contributed largely to
this improvement in public behaviour. Another main cause was a
new-found pride of the younger women, who wished everything
to conform in cleanliness and respectability to their new domestic
standards.
Since London clay, unlike Manhattan Island rock, would not
support skyscrapers, a limit was set by the L.C.C. to the height of
buildings (it is said that it was first imposed to placate Queen Vic-
160
DOMESTIC LIFE l6l
toria s fury at having her view of Westminster blocked by the
erection of Queen Anne s Mansions). London expanded outwards
rather than upwards. In any case, a suburban detached or semi
detached house, with the front door on ground level, and a bit of
garden, was what the working classes generally preferred to tene
ment-flats in the city. Huge housing estates were developed, and
new dormitory suburbs created by the extension of the Under
ground and Metropolitan railway systems. The first large extension
was in the autumn of 1923, when the Hampstead line was con
tinued from Golders Green as far as Hendon. Sir Philip Lloyd-
Graeme, afterwards Lord Swinton, President of the Board of
Trade, officially opened the new line by switching on the current
with a golden key. His ten-year-old son, wearing a bowler hat,
drove the first train, which contained only transport officials,
through to Hendon. In 1926 the Daily Express headlined the ques
tion: What will London be like in 1930? How soon will the popu
lation reach the ten-million mark? The Morden Underground
extension was to be opened that midsummer, and the Southern
Railway had recently electrified more local lines. In Morden it
was calculated that there was room for eight thousand houses and
twenty-five thousand people. Land that three or four years earlier
had been sold at 380 an acre was now worth 1,500.
There were similar developments at Edgware. The Underground
advertised: Stake your Claim at Edgware. Omar Khayyam s recipe
for turning the wilderness into paradise hardly fits an English cli
mate, but provision has been made at Edgware of an alternative
recipe which at least will convert pleasant, undulating fields into
happy homes. The loaf of bread, the jug of wine and the book of
verse may be got there cheaply and easily, and, apart from what
is said by the illustration, a shelter which comprises all the latest
labour-saving and sanitary conveniences. We moderns ask much
more before we are content than the ancients, and Edgware is
designed to give us that much more.
The loaf of bread, the jug of wine and the book of verse were to
be obtained from multiple stores which purchased the new shops
erected on these estates. These shops were designed to have plenty
of depth, though not the cosy back parlours which small traders
liked; they were brought up by W. H. Smith s the newsagents,
International Stores and Salisbury s the grocers, Dewhurst s the
162 DOMESTIC LIFE
butchers, The Victoria Wine Company, Lord Leverhulme s im
mense fish-retailing system, Mac Fisheries, the Express and United
Dairy Companies, Burton s and Meaker s the ready-made tailors,
the Times Furnishing Company, the Co-operatives, Woolworth s,
Marks & Spencer s, the British Home Stores. There was usually a
bank and occasionally a branch of one of the Building Societies
(which advanced money to the middle classes to buy these estate
houses and would also help them to buy and recondition approved
old houses), seldom a church or chapel. The roads on the new
estates were furnished by the builders: when first made, they looked
all that roads should be, but by the time that the houses had been
built, and the local Councils took them over, they were usually full
of holes and ruts.
Most of the houses put up were of red brick, and the prospec
tive tenants thought the designs ever so pretty . The problem of
the architect was how on a limited expenditure he could give what
was called individuality or personality to a house. People did not
care to live in oblong boxes, like the old yellow-brick slum houses,
and wanted something different from the ordinary , with pebble-
dash, half-timbering, ridge-tiling and unexpected minor features.
The houses they were given were not quite so grotesque as the
French seaside villas built at the same time the French likewise
wanted personality or cachet . There was no bright blue paint, no
Moorish arabesques and coloured tiles: but a tendency to mock-
Tudor exteriors. Yet the cost of houses still had to be kept down
to estimate: so on a suburban road one could often pass sixteen or
seventeen new 1,000 dwellings, each not bad in itself but all
precisely alike in their difference from the ordinary the same
unexpected feature of round stair-window, finacled porch, or
rough-elm-boarded garage appearing in Rosslyn , The Elms , Mon
Abri , Waratah , Orillia , Haytor , Treen , Bryn Newydd , and
all the rest. These were the houses of people with incomes of 5-
10 a week.
At a later stage the customers of the speculative builder insisted
on their houses being not merely distinctive but unlike those of
their immediate neighbours. The best contemporary studies of
architecture are Osbert Lancaster s Progress at Pelvis Bay, a satiric
account of the architectural degeneration of a seaside town, and
his Pillar to Post, the Pocket Lamp of Architecture, both illustrated
DOMESTIC LIFE 163
by himself. In the latter, after giving the characteristics and social
explanation of a variety of modern styles, he comes to By-Pass
Variegated .
As one passes by, one can amuse one s self by classifying the
various contributions which past styles have made to this infernal
amalgam; here are some quaint gables culled from Art Nouveau
surmounting a fagade that is plainly Modernistic in inspiration;
there the twisted beams and leaded panes of Stockbroker s Tudor
are happily contrasted with bright green tiles of obviously Pseudish
origin; next door some terra-cotta plaques, Pont Street Dutch in
character, enliven a white wood Wimbledon Transitional porch,
making it a splendid foil to a red-brick garage that is vaguely
Romanesque in feeling. But while he is heavily indebted to history
for the majority of his decorative and structural details (in almost
every case the worst features of the style from which they were
filched) , in the planning and disposition of his erections the specu
lative builder displays a genius that is all his own. Notice the skill
with which the houses are disposed, that insures that the largest
possible area of countryside is ruined with the minimum of expense;
see how carefully each householder is provided with a clear view
into the most private offices of his next-door neighbour and with
what studied disregard of the sun s aspect the principal rooms are
planned.
It is sad to reflect that so much ingenuity should have been
wasted on streets and estates which will inevitably become the
slums of the future. That is, if a fearful and more sudden fate does
not obliterate them prematurely; an eventuality that does much to
reconcile one to the prospect of aerial bombardment.
The poorer classes were given less fanciness in the Council
houses; and the new barrack-like tenements built in the cities under
the slum-clearance schemes were spared the gorblimey trimmings
of Portland stone which decorated the middle-class and luxury
flats. Lancaster remarked: They look like pickle factories, but
quite good pickle factories. One great blessing of the tenements
was that they were provided with wide paved courts where the
children could safely play; and another was that, unlike the luxury
flats, they were built away from the main streams of traffic and
were peaceful enough. Curious class-distinctions were observed
in the nomenclature of these new buildings. Working-class flats
164 DOMESTIC LIFE
formed tenements , and were usually named So-and-So Buildings ;
whereas middle-class and luxury flats formed blocks , and were
usually So-and-So Court or House or Close . Neither type,
however, could compare in comfort with the new German or
Austrian flats: there were few balconies, and these too small for
family use, and little storage room on the ground floors, even for
prams and bicycles. The classes were, indeed, being increasingly
separated by the layouts of new estates. The Town-Planning Act
of 193^2 perpetuated this cleavage. Until mid- Victorian days there
had been a mixed development of new houses, but now there was
zoning whole districts were to be developed at the scale of one
house to the acre, eight to the acre, or twelve to the acre, thus
inevitably segregating families according to their incomes.
The most remarkable outward change of the Twenties was in
the looks of women in the towns. The prematurely aged wife was
coming to be the exception rather than the rule. Children were
fewer and healthier and gave less trouble; labour-saving devices
were introduced, especially for washing, cleaning, and cooking
the introduction of stainless plate and cutlery saved an appre
ciable amount of time daily and this was only one of a hundred
such innovations. Provisioning also had become very much easier.
The advertising of branded goods was simplifying shopping prob
lems. Housewives came to count on certain brands of goods, which
advertisers never allowed them to forget. The manufacturers
motto was: Swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon, but
swear by constant advertising. They made things very easy for
the housewives by selling their foods in the nearest possible stage
to table-readiness: the complicated processes of making custard,
caramel, blanc-mange, jelly, and other puddings and sweets, were
reduced to a single short operation by the use of prepared powders.
Porridge had once been the almost universal middle-class breakfast
food. It now no longer took twenty minutes to cook, Quick Quaker
Oats reducing the time to two; but even so, cereals in the American
style, eaten with milk, began to challenge porridge and bacon and
eggs in prosperous homes, and the bread and margarine eaten by
the poor. At first the only choice was Force and Grape-Nuts; but
soon there was a bewildering variety of different flakes ; and grains
of rice, wheat and barley puffed by being fired at high velocity
from a sort of airgun. Bottled and tinned goods grew more and
DOMESTIC LIFE 165
more various and plentiful. When the war ended the only choice/
was soup, salmon, corned beef, Calif ornian fruits, and potted meat;
but by the Thirties almost every kind of domestic and foreign
fruit, meat, game, fish, vegetable could be bought, even in country
groceries. Foodstuffs that needed no tin-opener were also gradually
standardized: eggs, milk, and butter were graded and guaranteed
and greengrocers began selling branded oranges and bananas.
Housewives could send or ring up for goods without inspecting
them, more and more shops called daily or weekly for orders and
delivered free of charge, as light commercial vans displaced the
horse and cart. The fish-van brought fresh fish to the door even in
inland towns and villages. The cleanest and neatest shops secured
the best custom; flies and wasps disappeared from grocers counters,
finding no open pots of treacle or boxes of sugar to attract them,
and the butchers began keeping their carcases in refrigerators out
of sight, not suspended bleeding from hooks in the full glare of
the sun. By the Thirties cellophane, a cheap wood-pulp product,
was coming into general use for keeping dry groceries and cigarettes
fresh and clean, and soon also covered baskets of strawberries,
lumps of dates, and even kippers and other cured fish.
Woolworth s stores were the great cheap providers of household
utensils and materials. There had been a few 6 l / 2 d. Bazaars before
the war, but the Woolworth system was altogether new. It worked
by small profits and quick returns in a huge variety of classified
and displayed cut-price goods; some, such as excellent glass and
hardware, were even sold below cost price to attract custom. The
Daily Herald reported in 1924 that the T.U.C. was reviewing com
plaints about working conditions in Woolworth s c the well-known
bazaar-owners and that this was the more serious because the
stores were patronized chiefly by the working class. But the firm
never had any difficulty in engaging unskilled sales-girls at a low
wage; for the local Woolworth s was increasingly the focus of
popular life in most small towns. And the name of Woolworth
was a blessed one to the general public; wherever a new branch
was opened, the prices of ironmongers, drapers, and household
furnishers in the neighbourhood would drop twopence in the shil
ling. The middle class at first affected to despise Woolworth s
goods, but they soon caught the working-class habit and would
exclaim brightly among themselves: My dear guess where I got
l66 DOMESTIC LIFE
this amazing object threepence at Maison Woolworth! I don t
know how they do it/
Woolworth s, the Building Societies, and the Instalment System
made it financially possible for people of small means to take over
new houses. The instalment or never-never system was being ap
plied to all major household purchases, such as furniture, sewing-
machines, vacuum-cleaners, gas-ovens, wireless sets. A Punch
illustration showed a young mother, watching her husband writing
out the monthly cheque to pay off the maternity-home debt:
Darling, only one more instalment and Baby will be ours.
The Daily Mail greatly assisted in the general improvement of
living by its succession of Ideal Home Exhibitions. The British
Empire Exhibition of 1924 at Wembley did the same thing in a
more grandiose way; it was intended as much for enlarging the
domestic market as for encouraging the export trade. The exhibi
tion was advertised as deriving its interest from its intense realism .
The public found, in the first weeks after its official opening by
the King, that the roads between the pavilions named by Rudyard
Kipling Anson s Way , Drake s Way , Commonwealth Way ,
and so on were as muddy as country lanes. Kiwi Boot Polish
patriotically advertised: Wembley Mud Exaggerated. A little dirt
is certainly not going to deter Britishers from seeing this epoch-
making exhibition use Kiwi. As entertainment the exhibition
was a great success. The Queen s Doll s House, full of miniature
wonders, all done to exact scale, brought in 20,000 for charity.
It greatly endeared the Queen to the country, and the King too,
who was reported to have roared with laughter at a tiny tin of
Colman s mustard on the pantry shelf. Also there was a complete
Gold Coast village set up, on the model of the Assuan and Hairy
Ainu villages at the old Earl s Court permanent exhibition. The
Empire Pageant, depicting life in different parts of the Empire,
past and present, sometimes drew 25,000 people at a time. The
military tattoo included a reproduction of the Battle of Balaclava,
and air-raids started conflagrations that efficient firemen immedi
ately put out. The Amusement Park proprietors did very well
the Great Dipper was the steepest switch-back railway ever seen
in England, and there were flip-flaps, a cake-walk, or rocking-
platform, and all the latest American Luna Park thrills. But finan
cially the exhibition was a heavy failure, as almost every such
DOMESTIC LIFE 167
national exhibition had been since Prince Albert s successful Great
Exhibition of 1851.
The great change in women s clothes in the Twenties was
mainly due to the development of the artificial silk industry. Rayon
(as it was first officially called in 1927) was light, warm and cheap,
and took bright colours well. By its use, the weight of clothes that a
woman carried was reduced from pounds to ounces and the amounp
of material for a complete costume from nineteen yards to seven.
Underclothes, blouses, dresses, stockings, scarves all were soon
rayon.
Since rayon was not very durable, new clothes were bought
more frequently; which shortened the time-lag in fashions between
their sale to the well-to-do and their adoption by the poor. It was
now at last possible to mistake working girls for titled ladies, if one
judged by dress; and since educated speech was a valuable asset in
business, and the B.B.C. taught it free, as time went on one could
not always judge even by the voice. The American habit of buying
cheap mass-produced goods for short use was a novel one to the
British: it was gradually extended from clothes to shoes, handbags/
and household goods. If the old-fashioned shop assistants still mum
bled 1 can guarantee this it will last a lifetime , the modern come
back was Then for goodness sake show me something else!
The general outline of women s dress did not change much in
these years, though there was constant variation of trimmings and
draperies attached to blouses and skirts; sometimes blouses had
square necks instead of pointed ones, and there were fashions in
waistcoats and different jackets. Each season brought in a new
colour , meaning a new name for a hitherto unfashionable shade/
The Twenties showed great bravado in names "Yes, modom, we
stock it in all the new shades: Mud, Nigger, Rust, Gunmetal, Old
Boots, Dust, and Self.
By 1925 the skirt, after a temporary drop in 1922-3 to just
above the ankles, had receded to just below the knees even for
women of sixty and seventy, and in 1926 the knee-caps were often-
free and there was a glint of knickers. Yet bathing-dresses remained
modest, with high necks and long sleeves, and after bathing one
either wore a wrap or got dressed again. To play tennis without
stockings was considered immodest; and as late as 1923 the Under
ground refused advertisement-space to a French film showing girls
l68 DOMESTIC LIFE
wearing backless evening-dresses. In the following year the em
ployers of Birmingham waitresses started a morality crusade , for
bidding their staff to wear short skirts at all.
Short hair did not come into fashion among the well-to-do until
1923, when it was reported that many men are wearing their hair
long and permed at Deauville while women are almost all
"shingled", as the Americans call the new, very ugly bobbed and
shaved haircut. Newspapers mistook this for a passing fashion only
and came out with comments such as Bobbed Hair and Bobbed
Love , Shingle s Blow to Marriage . But the bob , shingle , and
bingle were succeeded in 1926 by the boyish Eton crop . Heavy
make-up was not yet practised. In 1922 the first Elizabeth Arden
advertisements appeared, but they were only for powder and eye
lash dye.
Men s fashions changed far more slowly. Most men still wore
, shirts with detachable hard collars; the soft collar was only sported
by motor-salesmen and similarly advanced business men. Flannel
trousers and plus-fours loose golfing knickerbockers first recorded
in 1920 at Oxford were only for holiday wear. But the heat-wave
of 1923 popularized tussore and other light materials and M.P.s
dared to appear in the House in something less stuffy than their
official black and grey. Mr. John Hodge made Parliamentary his
tory by turning up in a lemon-coloured shantung suit, cream socks,
and a panama hat.
The immediately post-war interior of a well-to-do sitting-room
was something of this sort. Walls of soft bluish-grey distemper
wallpaper had gone out during the war-time paper shortage, and
had not yet returned with, above, a low white picture-rail and a
dado of faintly blurred lilacs in their natural colours of white and
mauve, white woodwork and mantelpiece, a fireplace with pale
green tiles and a curb of polished steel, a pale green carpet, lilac-
patterned cretonne chair-covers, curtains of lilac-coloured silk,
and on the walls water-colours framed in dull silver. The furniture
was pseudo-Jacobean. This cool effect was disturbed in 1919 with
cushions and hangings in startling jazz patterns influenced by
Russian Ballet decor futuristic lamp shades, huge ridiculous
ornaments to make guests laugh, and a general clutter of souve
nirs . In 1922 came a swing back to sobriety: the mantelpieces and
walls grew less encumbered, and jazz-colours were succeeded by
DOMESTIC LIFE 169
pale apple-greens, lemon-yellows, and soft blues. The arty people
were proving their artistic seriousness by designing their own
cushion-covers and curtains, usually using balloon-silk remaindered
after the war. They dyed it by the Javanese batik method, which
was to cover with melted wax the part of the silk not intended to
take the dye. Good batik is a joy, the Daily Mail approved. In
1923 came the magpie school of decoration white walls and
woodwork, black curtains, black-and-white squared carpet. Then
a coloured-check period; after which it is difficult to trace any
period at all, because interior decoration had been discovered as
an art. This meant the exercise of ingenuity in a combination of
unusual woods, paints, fabrics, and bric-a-brac to express the per
sonality of the owner of the room or the purpose for which it was
intended: on the lines of the Continental painting fashion of collage
sticking odds and ends to the canvases to enhance an atmosphere.
Numbers of interior decorators made large incomes by collecting
odd and useless junk from antique shops and giving it a new life in
modernistic sitting-rooms in combination with stainless steel, white
paint, and plaster imitations of serpentine or malachite. Then
everyone became his own interior decorator.
This was the age of disguise. Since large houses had given way
to flats, space had to be greatly economized and furniture now had
a trick of folding away into nothing or revealing unexpected
secondary uses. It was not only a sofa that turned into a bed, but a
shelf -full of standard poets was also a telephone-container, an easy-
chair incorporated a cocktail-bar, a decorative screen opened out
into a bridge table. You never could have guessed if I hadn t shown
you. Old period pieces were vandalized 5 , as the antique dealers
called it, by being converted to modern uses: a William-and-Mary
commode would be gutted to house a gramophone and records; a
Georgian sewing-box repartitioned for cigarettes. In Stockbroker s
Tudor houses, as Osbert Lancaster noted, exceptional ingenuity
was displayed in olde-worlde disguise for interior fittings: Elec
trically produced heat warmed the hands of those who clustered
round the yule-logs burning so prettily in the vast hearth; the light
that showed so cosily from the old horn-lantern was obtained from
the grid; from the depths of some old iron chest were audible the
dulcet tones of Mr. Bing Crosby.
To save tablecloths, polished tables and mats were used. White
170 DOMESTIC LIFE
painted wooden twin-beds replaced the old mahogany or brass
double-bed for married couples. It was the time of glass-topped
dressing-tables: buoyant imitation-leather chairs; chromium-plate
and glass bathroom appliances; miraculously organized kitchen-
cupboards with white enamel fittings; lamps and lamp-shades of
degenerately seductive style.
The British motor-car industry had been stimulated by the
import duties on American cars and by the system of taxing car-
licenses according to horse-power for American cars were in
general more powerfully engined than the new British models. The
British were suspicious of speed and quick acceleration. In fact, a
recurring newspaper theme throughout the early Twenties was an
attack on motorists as road-hogs . Roads in some parts of England
were indeed thoroughly unsafe for motor traffic narrow places,
banks and hedges concealing turnings, bottle-necks, restive horses,
unattended railway crossings.
The Austin advertisements of 1919 had been headed with the
word Distinctionl Everything about the new Austin 20 is distinc
tive and high-class, the graceful streamline from the radiator to the
back of the body, unbroken by a flapping, bulging hood, is a feature
not to be found in any other car. For the aeronautical word
streamline was already applied early in the Twenties to other
objects than planes and airship-gondolas in this case to open cars.
The use of streamling as a modern style in domestic objects such as
electric irons, floor-polishers, and prams, followed in the middle
Thirties. The Ford Tin Lizzie was the greatest rival to the popular
British family four-seater: even with the tax it was still the least
expensive, and though much derided on account of its undistinctive
shape box-like body and diminutive bonnet was recognized, by
country drivers especially, as the most serviceable. It was now
manufactured in England, seventy per cent of the parts being
shipped over from what were termed mammoth factories in the
United States and Canada. But by 1923 British manufacturers were
also using mass-production methods, and though music-hall jokes
of the Harry Tate Motoring type were still as popular as ever, the
performance of cars was becoming reasonably trustworthy: one
seldom saw a car drawn up at the side of the road with the boots
DOMESTIC LIFE
of the driver sticking out from underneath as he tinkered away
with screwdriver and spanner. Soon the Morris-Cowley and Morris-
Oxford family cars ousted the Ford. In 1923 cord-fabric was first
used as a component of tyres, prolonging their lives by five thou
sand miles. Four-wheel brakes were also introduced, and super
chargers to improve acceleration. By 1924 the increasing use of cars
by week-enders brought the Baby Car into the market. The "Austin
Seven cost 165. It was described as The Mighty Miniature*, but
the popular name was The Bed Pan . Then came the solid-tyred
Trojan four-seater at 125, and the Morris Minor.
The many small firms among which British motor-production
had been divided were now beginning to amalgamate. Humber,
Hillman and Commer, for example, amalgamated in 1929, with
Rootes as their distributing agents. This grouping tendency, and
the disappearance of many small firms, such as Cubitt s, AC, and
Angus-Sanderson, were due to the pressure of mass-production. It
was not only the lower price of the mass-produced car that recom
mended it, but the readiness with which spare parts could be sup
plied a car of obscure make which met with a slight accident in
some distant country spot might have to wait days and even weeks
before the appropriate spare part could be found and fitted. Tech
nical improvements in bodies and engines meanwhile continued,
but in small, barely perceptible ways, as in film production. The
1913 25~h.p. Talbot, the first to exceed one hundred miles an hour,
was still considered a wonder of engineering, for a recently con
structed 30o-h.p. Fiat had failed to reach two hundred miles an
hour, although its engine was twelve times more powerful. The
gearless car and other equally revolutionary productions were con
stantly prophesied, but never arrived.
Scores of thousands of new drivers, who were given no pre
liminary tests, brought road accidents into the news. There was
hopeful talk of great new road-planning schemes; but for a long
time the authorities concentrated on widening and rectifying old"
roads rather than building new. The Automobile Association and
the Royal Automobile Club co-operated by putting up numerous
warning signs and providing scouts as extra traffic-policemen on
difficult cross-roads. Country people grew to hate cars, for their
noise, smell, danger, and the unconcerned bearing of the drivers,
172 DOMESTIC LIFE
and often encouraged children to pelt them with stones and line the
road with glass and upturned tacks to cause punctures. A new
division of Britain took place: Motorists and Pedestrians. In most
country places the magistrates were at first pedestrians, and im
posed heavy fines for the slightest offences. Their view was that
motoring was still not so much a means of transport, as a dangerous
form of sport. Motor-traps, of policemen with stopwatches, were
laid on long, straight, clear roads where motorists might be tempted
to exceed the local speed-limit; and, since the limit in some districts
was fifteen and even ten miles an hour, the courts were crowded.
Godalming Bench was the most notoriously pedestrian-minded of
all.
Parking was a great problem there were not enough car-parks
in any of the big cities and traffic jams were another. These often
lasted twenty minutes and sometimes half an hour; for there was no
central control, and a complicated crossing like Piccadilly Circus
was managed by several policemen at once. Point-duty and a watch
on motorists offences were engrossing the attention of the con
stabulary almost to the exclusion of all other social services. Though
hundreds of policemen were employed on the Derby course and
its approaches in 1928, the forty thousand cars that appeared caused
jams that took hours to sort out. Safety First campaigns started in
the Press. Pedestrians were advised not to cross roads between meet
ing trams, not to stoop to pick up parcels in the street, and not to
read newspapers when crossing roads. But the only new traffic
regulation adopted in the cities was to limit side-streets in busy
areas to one-way traffic.
Buses began to run on new traffic routes: as London and other
cities spread out, so the local buses extended their itineraries.
Covered-in buses were now the rule; fresh-air lovers complained,
forgetting the misery of an upper deck on a cold, rainy, windy
day. Pneumatic tyres were also replacing solid ones. A new sort of
bus-service began the long-distance charabanc which challenged
the railway for speed and comfort, and even made night journeys
from the north and west of England to London. It was the chara
banc that opened up rural districts of the Midlands and East Anglia
which were still almost inaccessible by rail. This new development
greatly vexed the railways; and also the local authorities through
whose districts the charabancs pounded their non-stop way
DOMESTIC LIFE 173
because the cost of keeping the roads in repair fell less on the chara
banc companies than on ratepayers who did not directly benefit by
the service.
The public soon realized that old-established omnibus companies
were only private concerns after all. The scarlet of the London
General Omnibuses, which suggested pillar-boxes, Post Office vans,
Guards uniforms, and other unchallengeable public institutions, did
not protect them from competition by small bus companies and
even one-man-one-bus concerns. Not only did private buses some
scarlet, some green, some blue start competing with Generals
over die same routes, but they also reduced fares. There was a
startling case of General versus Admiral . An Admiral bus from
Southgate to Wood Green was approaching its terminus at Garage
Road, when a General inspector on the far side of the road gave
a signal, and a General bus shot out from a concealed turning. A
collision was narrowly avoided by the good driving of both drivers.
The passengers on board the Admiral felt strongly enough about
the rights of private buses to call the police and take action. At
court the defendant driver was charged by the Admirals with
being an extra turn : especially employed to chase Admirals and
get to the bus-stops before them. He was cautioned and fined 10
for dangerous driving, the magistrate observing that the fault lay
not with him but with those Generals who gave the inspector
orders to signal him on.
The cheap car and the new bus-services brought about a devel
opment of the housing industry: ribbon-building. This meant
stringing houses along main roads instead of building them in com
pact village-like masses. For the tenants, the advantage was obvious:
they had direct access to the road, and they got an uninterrupted
country view from their back windows. But it spoilt the roads for
travellers, who saw only the houses and, in gaps between houses,
advertisements of Desirable Building Sites, and of Petrol and Motor
Oil. Stanley Baldwin in a speech at Winchester in July 1928
warned: It is no exaggeration to say that in fifty years at the rate
so-called improvements are being made, the destruction of all the
beauty and charm with which our ancestors enhanced their towns
and villages will be complete. Yet steps were already being taken
to avoid the worst outrages. The National Trust was buying estates
in different parts of the country, in order to save them for the
174 DOMESTIC LIFE
nation, and several special bodies, such as the Oxford Preservation
Trust, came into existence. Even local councils sometimes discov
ered a conscience: in 1928, for instance, the Mid-Surrey Town-
Planning Council saved the commons in the Dorking-Reigate
region from being sacrificed to road-makers and speculative build
ers. And the larger petrol firms, such as Shell and B.P., won public
applause and saved themselves a great deal of money by agreeing
to support the preservation of the countryside movement: they
took down most of their competitive roadside hoardings.
The countryside was going through a difficult time. Some
farmers had made a great deal of money during the war by selling
fodder to the Army during a fodder shortage, and potatoes during
a potato shortage, and recklessly ploughing up pastures which
should never have been disturbed. They used cheap female labour,
and neglected ditching and draining. Extravagant stories went
around of farmers wintering in 1919 on the French Riviera: actu
ally, most of those that did not bank their savings against bad
seasons ahead were tenant-farmers who were now forced to buy
their holdings the landlords were selling up because of the heavy
land-tax if they did not wish to leave them altogether. Many
raised part of their purchase money by mortgages, and when after
the slump of 1921 farms .hugely depreciated in value, the interest
on mortgages still had to be paid. Also, the prices of farm-produce
fell seriously twice: in 1921 and in 1929. Farmers were also com
plaining of the extra cost of labour, caused by the minimum wage
regulations, and the scarcity of good men. This burden would
have been offset by the various Government reliefs and subsidies
had British farmers been quicker at learning new ways; but many
of them were better ploughmen or veterinarians than accountants
or chemists, and slow to combine together for co-operative buying
and marketing as the Irish and Danes had done so successfully
and slower still to develop new markets. The situation was compli
cated by large numbers of slut farmers men with sufficient
private means not to worry about making their farms pay. They
left their fields to get full of thistles and even thornbushes, which
provided cover for game; and found rough shooting far more fun
than uneconomic farmwork. However, the Government did what
it could to teach those who wished to learn, the B.B.C. being of
great assistance; and towards the end of the Twenties, tractors,
DOMESTIC LIFE 175
which had been tried during the war but largely abandoned be
cause of their mechanical defects, came in again with better models.
A few farms in East Anglia and in Hampshire were wholly mechan
ized and produced cereals at a very low cost even by comparison
with the farms of Canada and Australia.
The general tendency was away from arable fanning. Between
1919 and 1939 more than three million acres passed out of culti
vation, in spite of the great increase in sugar-beet growing, which
was encouraged by Government subsidy. Farmers went in for live
stock, instead, chiefly because they were unable to compete with
cheap Australian and Canadian wheat. The largest demand for Brit
ish wheat was for biscuit-making, for which it was particularly
suitable. Market gardening also increased, to meet the needs of the
canning industry. Before the war most tinned vegetables and fruits
came from America, but by the end of the Thirties the greater part
of the trade except for citrus fruits, pineapples, and peaches
was British. Peas became the most important vegetable crop, and
raspberries, loganberries, strawberries, and plums the chief fruits.
A great deal of market gardening was done on small holdings.
Sixteen thousand of these were created after the war, and twenty-
four thousand ex-Servicemen settled on them. By 1926 a quarter
of these had left. Small holdings really were uneconomic, but the
system was kept alive by the willingness of the holders to pay for
their independence by long hours of hard labour. By the end of the
period agricultural workers had decreased by 250,000.
Another trouble which beset British farming was the spread of
foot-and-mouth disease from the Continent. This was especially
serious at a time when more and more farmers were taking up live
stock farming. Outbreaks of foot-and-mouth occurred in 1922,
1923, 1924, and 1926, and cost the country over 3,000,000 paid
in compensation for the compulsory slaughter of the infected cattle.
The compensation did not differentiate between pedigree and ordi
nary stock, so that the loss in actual wealth was even greater than
this. In 1926 importations of livestock from the Continent were
temporarily forbidden, and thereafter strictly controlled. In spite of
much research, practical means of relief remained undiscovered:
slaughter of the sick beasts, quarantine of the rest, orders against the
conveyance of infected straw and fodder were the only palliatives
known.
DOMESTIC LIFE
In the areas around towns and cities, especially London, much
farming land was being used up by the extension of housing estates.
The problem of housing agricultural workers was everywhere a
difficult one. Old cottages were being condemned by sanitary
authorities, very few new ones being built, and the agricultural
labourer on his meagre pay only 305. in some parts of East Anglia
could not compete with the week-ender from town for the pos
session of any cottage that fell empty. Cottage rents before the war
had varied from half a crown weekly to five shillings! by the
middle Twenties a cottage at even ten shillings- a week was a rarity,
unless in a district where company water, sewerage, gas, and elec
tricity had not yet penetrated.
There was strangely little difference between the food of the
lower-grade industrial and agricultural workers: the main meal in
either case was supper, consisting of strong tea, bread and mar
garine, tinned salmon or sardines if this could be afforded other
wise, fish and meat pastes. The bread was bleached white bread,
which lacked the hearty consistence of the old stone-ground whole
meal loaf that had been the traditional food of the British labouring
classes. In the country, as a rule, only one hot midday meal was
cooked a week, on Sundays: otherwise it was bread and cheese,
with pickles. This was partly due to the high price of coal in many
country districts and to a lack of wood. The poor man seldom had
scraps enough to fatten a pig; and if he happened to have enough,
he first had to get permission from the sanitary inspector to erect
a pig-stye; which, for sanitary reasons, was only granted when
there were no neighbours to complain of the smell, noise, etc.
besides, the building of an approved pig-stye was no cheap matter.
Compulsory education also kept his children from herding geese
along the roadsides. Cottagers tended to grow flowers in their
small gardens rather than vegetables, and wild salads such as dande
lion and watercress were no longer gathered, nor country wines
bottled. Sir William Beach Thomas, writing in the Spectator in July
1927, reported the complaints of a farmer against the mania for
tinned food: * "Two-thirds of our people," he maintained, "con
sume not fresh but tinned milk, as well as much other tinned food
(as you could infer ocularly from the village dump)". He would
prohibit or heavily tax this tinned milk for the sake of national
DOMESTIC LIFE 177
health, not less than for the good of the farming community. A
taste for fresh home-grown food is essential for the physical welfare
of our people/
This fanner had evidently been reading about vitamins which,
though discovered by C. Funk in 1912, were not taken up popu
larly until the early Twenties. Before this, people in general had
known a little about such food constituents as proteins and carbo
hydrates. And calories as a measure of the energy-results of food
were as old as the Boer War the Westminster Gazette had cal
culated in 1901 that soldiers must have at least 3,500 calories daily
in their ration. The Daily Herald in its protest in 1921 against the
diet to which dockers were reduced still reckoned in terms of
calories. But when vitamins came into fashion, they ousted all these
elder terms; and since the scientists could not pretend to know
exactly what they were, chemically speaking, but had established
that their absence caused deficiency diseases, a number of health
foods were launched which claimed to contain them. There had
been health-addicts for many years even Eustace Miles-Bernard
Shaw vegetarianism was as old as Shelley s day but the special
Health Food Shops which flourished between 1923 and 1934 and
sold exotic nuts, dried fruits, herb-teas, breakfast cereals, tonic
wines, grated carrots, vegetable cooking-fats, and so on, were some
thing new. They were connected with Theosophy, New Thought,
and other esoteric philosophies, and with the Coue-ists, who used to
repeat a hundred times a da^ to themselves under their breath the
formula they had learned from Professor Coue, the French psycho
logist: Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better.
(Coue believed that auto-suggestion could cure many ailments, in
cluding nervous dyspepsia; the Sunday Express reported in June
1922 that the Foreign Secretary, Lord Curzon, who was suffering
from a persistent attack of insomnia, had sent for him from Paris in
the hope of obtaining some relief. Under Coue s influence Lord
Curzon made a distinct improvement for some days, but soon
relapsed into his usual sleeplessness. In the following year, however,
Coue had more success: he was able to cure a number of sea-sick
passengers on the liner Majestic, which was fighting its way through
a severe Atlantic gale, by first converting the stewardesses.)
Vitamins were the great stand-by of the Health Shops. They
178 DOMESTIC LIFE
sold a special "Vitamine Cream and a bread which was advertised:
The secret of its nourishment is the wonderful vitamine it con
tains: without this, health cannot be maintained/
Patent medicines, all of which had gained the highest medical
approval* and offered a wide curative scope, were advertised more
widely than ever in the Press; and the Press politely abstained every
year from making news of the official analytic Register of Patent
Medicines, which gave away the pitiful secrets of pills, wines, oint
ments, salves, and cure-alls. The vitamins sold in patent-food form
and at patent-medicine prices could have been absorbed just as
easily and far more cheaply by chewing a few blades of grass.
Bovril disdained such trickery. It had taken its name originally
from the vitalizing fluid VriT in Bulwer Lytton s Utopian novel
The C&ming Race of 1871: and anyhow was not a food it had
been exempt from the burdensome ration restrictions that fresh
meat extracts, such as Brand s Essence of Beef, had undergone in
the war it was still a vitalizing fluid. Bovril now used historical
references in its advertisements. One ran: Napoleon s Secret. The
Secret of Napoleon s power was his immense vitality. The same is
true of most great men Julius Caesar, Michelangelo, Gladstone,
Cecil Rhodes they were successful because they were never tired.
Don t get tired, drink Bovril. This was accompanied with a large
arresting portrait of Napoleon in one of his more truculent moods,
and with smaller portraits of the other Vital men.
The fashion for slimming was not widespread until 1927, when
it set off the Eton crop; in the full tide of the Twenties advertise
ments were rather for Skinny People who wished to gain two and
a half stone of sound healthy flesh in six weeks , than for the Plump
who wished to slough off the same amount. But vitamins were all-
weather favourites: they nourished the slimmer, as well as the per
son in search of sound healthy flesh; and before the end of the
Thirties were lettered from A to E in the hearts of even the most
backward villager. Everyone then talked Diet and read Diet, espe
cially the balanced Diet 3 . In 1927 the Lancet introduced the idea
of roughage it was, apparently, useless to eat nothing but vita
mins, proteins, and carbo-hydrates these needed something fibrous
and banal to introduce them to the intestines. Roughage was the
last term to enter the popular dietetic vocabulary: it was interpreted
to mean something scratchy like bran, the peel that one had hitherto
DOMESTIC LIFE 179
removed from stringy celery, and the stalky ends of asparagus
anything to give the vitamins full play. There immediately appeared
roughage breakfast foods, such as bran, to supply this need. All
was well again: bran taken out of the flour, in order to give white
bread the bleached appearance that people liked, was now being
sold back to them in nice-looking packets, at the price of three
small loaves.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Art, Literature, and Religion
The general history of painting goes something like this: first
painters painted things as they saw them emotionally; then they
painted conventional religious or poetical fancies; then they painted
things as they intellectually saw them, with an increasing attention
to detail; then they painted according to rules derived from the
work of the more intelligent painters. This last stage was called
Academicism. In France, in the eighteen-eighties, appeared Impres
sionism a way of painting things as one saw them at first glance
without consideration of details. This was followed early in the
twentieth century by Post-Impressionism, which was to paint
things with a conscious disregard of how one intellectually knew
them to be, for the purpose of emphasizing their emotional sign if?-
cance. In 1908 came Cubism, in which designs were based on the
prism as the spectral source of colour appearance. Futurism, the
only new Continental fashion which was Italian, not French, began
in the same year: it represented the painter s dynamic private emo
tions as they were affected by vision. Then came Expressionism,
which had its inspiration in Bergsonian psychology and was sup
posed to be a yielding to the Violent storms of emotion beating
up from the unconscious mind . After an interval of Dadaism,
which was art s scornful denial of art, Surrealism supervened. This
went back several steps and then took a step in another direction.
The idea of the Surrealists was to express anti-conventional fancies
with realistic ardour: to produce a -frisson, or shudder a naked
foot dog s-earing a book with the toes, candles rising like sand-
worms from a seashore, the blue sea washing into a drawing-room,
a beautiful nude with hands where her breasts should be. The
Surrealists in Paris, like the Futurists, Dadaists, and Expressionists,
were not merely painters and sculptors, they were also writers,
i So
ART, LITERATURE, AND RELIGION l8l
interior decorators, dramatists, and amateur philosophers. They
flourished in the middle Twenties. In 1927 they held a conference
on sex and published the results of their inquiries: they applauded
the frissons derivable from the seduction of nuns and of women
who never washed, from outre sexual positions, from homosexual
eccentricity. All these art-movements in turn came to London from
Paris: but British avant-garde painting and criticism was always
two or three steps behind French fashion, and British popular taste
two or three steps behind the avant-garde painters and critics.
In London, when the war ended, the Academicians were the
dominant group, especially the Royal Academicians; but a number
of Impressionists had also attained respectability even the British
Journal of Photography would no longer dare refer to the hideous
plague of Impressionistic smudges . Their literary champion was
one of themselves, Roger Fry, whose Vision and Design became a
text-book and whose Omega Workshops produced simple furni
ture painted in all manner of confused colours: like a Dragon s
miscarriage , as a more academic painter impressionistically put it.
Post-Impressionists were also on their way to respectability. The
educated classes were ready not only to indulge them but even to
pay good money for their work; on the recommendation of such
serious critics as Clive Bell, whose Since Cezanne appeared in 1922.
But they found Vorticism (a British blend of Futurism, Cubism,
and Expressionism, sponsored by the painter-novelist Wyndham
Lewis) too speculative a market as yet.
The Observer had commented during the war: "The reviled
Post-Impressionists, Cubists, Futurists, Expressionists, Vorticists
of to-day may be the honoured masters of to-morrow. The more
popular Press was aware of this too, but knew that the average
time-lag in art-fashions between France and educated England was
about twelve years, and between educated England and the masses
another twelve at least. They therefore felt it their duty not to
hurry things on too fast, but to take their artistic stand between
the old Academicians, who religiously painted each leaf of a tree the
appropriate brown or green, and the Post-Impressionists, who were
quite likely to paint the whole foliage in a series of red scrawls and
make the trunk not only bright blue but discontinuous. The Daily
Mail in 1924, in fact, stood about where the Studio stood in 1912,
and would not catch up with the Studio of 1924 until 1936. The
182 ART, LITERATURE, AND RELIGION
celebrated painters of the popular Press in the early Twenties
were therefore Augustus John, William Orpen, Ambrose McEvoy,
and the prime flatterer, Philip de Laszlo; and the populace was
rather encouraged than otherwise in its active opposition to Jacob
Epstein. As late as October 1929 Rima was again assaulted, with
tar and a few feathers; and when in the same year Epstein s new
work Night was unveiled over the entrance to the Underground
headquarters in Broadway, Westminster, four young men, two in
plus-fours, attempted to throw glass tar-containers at it. They
were frustrated by the police, and drove away hurriedly in a car.
Epstein, when interviewed by reporters upon these attacks, de
clared that he was in the historical tradition: Michelangelo, for in
stance, had been obliged to put bars around his statue David at
Florence in order to prevent the mob from mutilating it. An Ep
stein exhibition in 1931 included a large marble statue Genesis . It-
attracted record crowds to the Leicester Galleries, and had the
usual man-handling from the popular Press. The Sunday Express
described it as so gross, obscene and horrible that no newspaper
has even published a full picture of it. As dinner-table decorations
in ice-cream these atrocities would at least be gone by next morn
ing!
The painter who organized and led the painting avant-garde
throughout the period was the restless Ben Nicholson, whose self-
imposed task it was continuously to shorten the time-lag between
Paris and London, and especially to help people catch up with each
new period of the inventive Catalan painter Pablo Picasso, who
set the Paris fashions year after year. Nicholson started a succession
of new groups and in each case broke away with a minority when
the group seemed no longer up to date. There was Group X, and
then the Seven and Five, and then Unit One, and so on. In 1926
the Seven and Five Exhibition was headlined in the Daily Express:
Weird Puzzles in Paint . The tone was ironic: The pictures and
sculptures confirm the artists ability to express what they feel; they
proclaim also that it is unnecessary to express these feelings in their
present state to a wider circle than the society itself provides.
Claude Flight s prismatically painted Street Singers , which would
have been regarded in Paris in 1912 as rather viezix jeu, was dis
missed as desperately clever . And: Mr. Ben Nicholson has three
muddy nudes against wishy-washy backgrounds. It is obvious that
ART, LITERATURE, AND RELIGION 183
the figures are not meant to be anatomically probable one woman s
ankles are three times the width of her neck; one wonders simply
why he had to paint them. This sort of criticism continued in the
popular Press until almost the end of the Peace. Even the old master,
El Greco, whose Agony had been bought for the National Gal
lery in 1919, was, for some years more, popularly regarded as
unworthy of inclusion there. Stewart Dick, the Academician,
described it in his Half-hours in the National Gallery as on the
borderline of sanity ; but the more charitable theory was elsewhere
advanced that El Greco had suffered from some optical malady.
The avant-garde spoke of the Academicians with cold con
tempt as Les Pompiers. Some of them even tried reprisals against
the tar-and-feather brigade: in 1928 Sir George Frampton s senti
mental Peter Pan statue in Kensington Gardens narrowly escaped
mutilation. The public meanwhile was slowly being educated into
seeing things in an Impressionistic or Post-Impressionistic way; and
not by attending picture galleries, but by fashion sketches and ad
vertisements. The lively Underground posters by McKnight
Kauffer, Albert Rutherston, and Paul Nash were not torn down
by irate strap-hangers or even disparaged by contrast with the dig
nified advertising work that such English pompiers as Frank Brang-
wyn consented to do for the Empire Marketing Board. In 1925 Sir
George Frampton, R.A., described as splendid the movement for
decorating our streets with posters designed by some of our best
artists; and it is the wish and hope of many that this really live
movement should extend to permanent decorations, illustrating the
history of our great Empire, and placed not only on the walls of
public buildings, but also on those of our elementary schools, espe
cially in slum districts. But the best artists did not possess the
vitality that the advertising business, which was almost wholly
American in spirit and direction, demanded; their ideal woman was
still the slow, unathletic, big-bosomed Juno with the clinging
draperies, that she had been before the war, and quite hopeless as a
sales-girl.
The chief theme of R. H. Wilenski s influential Modern Art,
which was published in 1927 and ran into several editions, was that
photography had relieved artists of the job of naturalistic por
traiture and landscape: they could now concentrate on enlarging
experience by the grouping and colouring of abstract shapes in the
184 ART, LITERATURE, AND RELIGION
classical manner. The public was by then relativity-minded enough
not to care very much what convention the artists adopted, or what
terms the critics used, so long as the result was neither dull nor
demanded esoteric effort from them. They persistently refused to
accept abstractions as objects of study, though as decorative trim
mings they were all very well. The respectable Queen in 1921
praised the novelty of quaint futuristic or jazz embroidery and
the Observer in 1927, ladies coats displaying cubistic ideas, amus
ing to study in detail/
People in general had been so well accustomed to deliberate
distortion by die cinema cartoon, by caricatures, by fashion plates
elongating women to a prescribed 150 per cent of their natural
proportions, and by streamlined modernistic car-mascots and such,
that their only objection to Post-Impressionism and Expressionism
was when the distortion was heavy and repellent in effect as with
Epstein, and the imitators of Picasso s Gertrude Stein period, and
the morose Wyndham Lewis ( The Enemy , as he called himself).
They rather liked Stanley Spencer, of whom the Sphere wrote that
he had the stark realism of inner vision . His paintings, though
modernistically simplified, did at least recognizably represent peo
ple. Besides, he painted problem pictures , as they were called. The
newspapers every year featured a problem picture in the Royal
Academy exhibition. There was one, for instance, showing a mid
dle-aged professional man sitting on a chair gazing stonily in front
of him: weeping on the floor with her head on his knee sat a pretty
young woman. It was called The Fallen Idol . The problem was:
Which of the two has fallen has he, presumably the husband,
owned up to forgery, or she, presumably the wife, owned up to
adultery? But that was the distinguished painter s secret, which he
roguishly refused to give away to reporters. Stanley Spencer s
"Resurrection , which showed cubistical souls rising from their
graves on Judgement Day, was not a weird puzzle in paint : it was
a journalizable problem: Where are the waiting angels? Are these
the souls of the saved or the souls of the damned?
A running horse has twenty legs was the old revolutionary
Post-Impressionist formula, and it was possible now to advertise
petrol by a galloping horse with twenty flickering legs, illustrating
quick startability . The full force of popular derision was turned
rather on the academically heroic horse given Lord Haig to ride
ART, LITERATURE, AND RELIGION 185
in his commemorative public statue by Alfred Hardiman Lord
Haig, who not long before his death had opposed Army mechaniza
tion with: As time goes on you will find just as much use for the
horse, the well-bred horse, as you have ever done in the past.
Hardiman kept tinkering away at his work in face of hostile
criticism from Lord Haig s widow and horse-loving friends: die
Academical-heroic was out of fashion in the depiction of men and
horses. Alfred Munnings had set a standard of veterinary realism in
his equestrian portraits that no sculptor could afford to flout. The
statue was finally unveiled on Armistice Day 1937 by which
time Haig s military reputation had slumped nearly to zero: Liddell
Hart s account of the Tasschendaele blood-bath , ordered by Haig
against all military common sense, had been widely read and could
not be contradicted. The Times, however, reported on the dispirited
final version of the Memorial Statue: The work as now is a com
promise: the head of Haig is not in the same degree of stylization as
the charger and cloak, but having regard to all circumstances, a
successful compromise. . . . Mr. Hardiman is to be congratulated
as much upon the patience as the skill with which he has modified
his first conception in response to criticisms, expert from the mili
tary and veterinary points of view, but not so with regard to
sculpture/
That Academicism was losing ground rapidly was shown in the
frightful fall in the values of Victorian paintings from thousands of
guineas to a few shillings, and the compensating rise in the works
of Manet, Cezanne, Van Gogh, the douanier Rousseau, and other
safely dead French masters.
These movements in art had their literary equivalents. Paris be
came a centre of verbal experimentalism with James Joyce and
Gertrude Stein as the two main exemplars, and with several maga
zines and one or two English presses to canalize production. It was
at Paris that British and American literary avant-gardistes fraternized
or came to blows. But though in the States an advanced writer or
painter had first to go to Paris before he was accepted as arrived, in
Britain the case was not so serious: there was an established avant-
garde colony centred at Bloomsbury around the Hogarth Press
Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Duncan Grant, and Vanessa Bell
and the Sitwells, symbols of ultra-modernism in the popular Press,
had close affiliations with Paris but resided in London. Aldous Hux-
l86 ART, LITERATURE, AND RELIGION
ley, who with James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence made up the out
standing trio of modernistic novelists , preferred living in Italy:
and D. H. Lawrence lived all over the place.
Aldous Huxley had no eccentric history like James Joyce
Jesuit-trained, Irish ex-singer or like D. H. Lawrence, brilliant
consumptive, son of a working-class family in a midland industrial
town: he came from a well-known English intellectual family.
What he had in common with these other two was that he had read
too much and wished to make some sort of synthesis of his reading,
but could not face the task: when he finally made his testament in
1938 in Erids and Means the reading was still undigested. Mean
while he wrote a number of critical essays, novels, and short stories
which, until Evelyn Waugh in 1928 rose to dispute his position,
made him the brightest of our younger writers . The Times Lite
rary Supplement said in 1922 of Crome Yellow: Mr. Huxley ticks
off the present world and its vagaries social, scientific, literary,
artistic, sexual, occult, clerical, amorous, what-not with the light
est and gayest of pens. He was the novelist of intellectual sexuality,
as was D. H. Lawrence of emotional sexuality.
Lawrence preached the Sun as a procreative deity; urged women
that happiness for them lay only in yielding submissively to the
dark sexual urge of strong-loined men; and mixed up for himself a
confused private religion of the theosophical incoherences of
Madame Blavatsky, the Yoga writings of an obscure prophet named
Pryse, the philosophical view of Heraclitus, Bacon and Bergson
that all is flux, Jeans s interpretation of Einstein, the anthropology
of Sir James Fraser (whose Golden Bough was a key book of the
period) and others, Mexican legend, and the whole literature of
Freudian, Jungian and Adlerian psychology. Lawrence was with
out either Huxley s wit, or Joyce s playboy humour: he lived an
anguished, bathetic life, and had a huge, anguished, bathetic fol
lowing. His nearest approach to happiness was when in his last days
at Taos, New Mexico, he bought a cow called Susan and used to
milk her with mystic devotion. The queer cowy mystery of her is
her changeless cowy desirableness/ He died in 1930, and a lesser
Lawrence legend started when several of his friends wrote biog
raphies of him, each contradicting the other.
James Joyce introduced into literature the stream of conscious
ness technique with Ulysses, the most famous novel of the period,
ART, LITERATURE, AND RELIGION 187
which reconstructed in over a thousand pages, written in a variety
of real and parodied styles, a single day in Edwardian Dublin. It
was banned as obscene in Britain, but was referred to apprecia
tively in the literary Press, even in leaders of the Times Literary
Supplement, which, however, would not venture to review it. The
stream of consciousness was a method of writing in which the
thoughts and feelings of characters were more important than
action or dialogue. The method was also adopted by Virginia
Woolf, daughter of a Victorian man-of -letters, in her novel To
The Lighthouse, and others. Like E. M. Forster, she wrote with
her nervous sensibilities, so that her readers shrank sympathetically
at each painfully composed paragraph. She was married to Leonard
Woolf, author of The Jungle, a competent novel about Ceylon,
founder of the Hogarth Press (with money won in a Calcutta
Sweep), whose book International Government suggested the
working system of the International Labour Office at Geneva
which was the most practically successful of the League s under
takings.
The Sitwells, Osbert, Edith and Sacheverell, were brothers and
sister of an eccentric county family. Osbert was the showman,
knockabout rhymester, novelist, satirist; Sacheverell the rambling,
romantic poet who was also an authority on Baroque architecture;
Edith a sincere, irritable, very limited poet with a considerable
knowledge of advanced French art and literature, who in such
lines as:
Jane, Jane,
Tall as a crane,
The morning light creaks down again
was trying to make French Expressionism at home in an English
nursery-rhyme world. Together they launched a number of fash
ions, chiefly in music, pictures and interior decoration; they always
had a wide, if not a good, Press for their exploits; and were chiefly
known for their popularization of early Victorian period furnish
ings until then the Regency was the most recent of admired
epochs. In the Thirties they instituted an annual mock prize which
they conferred on the person who seemed to them the dreariest of
those in semi-fashionable favour, and thus set themselves up as
l88 ART, LITERATURE, AND RELIGION
arbiters of literary elegance. Osbert became a Sunday columnist for
awhile.
The London Mercury continued to represent the traditional
stream of poetry: the chief younger writers being Edmund Blun-
den, whose pastoral poems had, according to the Times Literary
Supplement, the savour which English literature has always loved ,
and Victoria Sackville-West, whose The Land, a long aristocratic
poem about country joys, was the last notable Georgian poem to
appear. There was also a busy Jewish civil servant, Humbert
Wolfe, whose duty at the Ministry of Labour was to interview
strikers deputations and send them away charmed and hopeful. His
poems, beginning with Kensington Gardens, had a huge vogue in
the middle Twenties. They expressed easy sentiment in apparently
advanced metaphors and the capital letters were modemistically
lower-cased at the beginning of lines. The Times was shrewd
enough to remark that, in spite of the certainty and delicacy of
touch of a master musician , there was a lack of substance in his
verse.
Gertrude Stein, who was the chief literary link between the
British and American avant-garde writers, musicians and painters,
and the French, was an American who had been the psychologist
William James s favourite pupil. At Johns Hopkins University she
had studied fatigue reactions. She had been living in Paris for some
years now, doing research in the English language to test its capa
city for the conveyance of sense when grammatic and syntactical
usage was relaxed on the technical analogy of Impressionism and
Post-Impressionism. There was an undeniably comic side to the
results of this research, however serious the intention, and since her
publication of Tender Buttons, some years before the war, she had
been a stock joke in British journalism. She persisted in her work,
which somehow got published even in London: the Hogarth Press
published her short and easy Composition as Explanation in 1926
and the Seizin Press her difficult Acquaintance with Description in
1927. She presided pontifically in Paris over the avant-gardistes.
Her rich collection of early Picasso paintings proved that she had
authority to give her blessing to any new generation of experi
mentalists who always came to demand it in music, art or litera
ture. There was a low-brow American Limerick current in the
Twenties:
ART, LITERATURE, AND RELIGION 189
1 don t like the family Stein!
There is Gert, there is Ep, there is Ein.
Gert s writings are punk,
Ep s statues are junk,
Nor can anyone understand
It was in 1927 that Laura Riding, a young American who had
recently come to Europe, first published her poems and critical
work in England. Wiping her slate clean of literary and domestic
affiliations with America, she became for the next twelve years the
best of good Europeans ; the Americans only knew her as the
highest apple on the British intellectual tree . In England she was
assailed as a leg-puller , crossword puzzle setter , Tuturist , tire
some intellectualist*, and so on: none of her books sold more than
a few dozen copies, nor did she ever (as Gertrude Stein did after
the Wall Street crash, in her chatty Autobiography of Alice B.
Toklas and during her American lecture tour), consent to give the
larger public what it really wanted. She was the one poet of the
time who spun, like Arachne, from her own vitals without any
discoverable philosophical or literary derivations: and the only one
who achieved an unshakable synthesis. Unshakable, that is, if the
premiss of her unique personal authority were granted, and another
more startling one that historic Time had effectively come to an
end. In her Preli?mnaries to Epilogue I she wrote:
All the Chinese bandits having chopped off all the foreign ears,
we have time to consider not only the subject Atrocity, but the
subject Bandits, and the subject Missionaries, and the subject For
eigners, and the subject Chinese. All the politicians who are going
to be elected have been elected; and all the artificial excitement in
events which no one really regards as either very important or very
interesting has been exhausted. All the historical events have hap
pened.
This left the poets the pleasant if arduous duty of reporting
the single event possible after everything has happened: a deter
mination of values . The literary avant-gardistes could do nothing
with her: she was interested in value, not in post-temporal fashion,
she had a better head than any of them and a better heart than
most, she was accessible but not clubbable, and she resented the
constant unacknowledged borrowing from her work by the am
bitious and insincere. This made everyone uncomfortable: they
190 ART, LITERATURE, AND RELIGION
would have liked to make a Great Woman of her, but to do so
would have meant changing their own unsynthesized habits. They
did their best to ignore her. Laura Riding was remarkable as being
in the period but not of the period, and the only woman who spoke
with authority in the name of Woman (as so many men in the
name of Man) without either deference to the male tradition or
feministic equalitarianism: a perfect original. At the very end of
the period she returned to the United States, surprisingly rediscov
ered her American self, and wiped the slate clean again.
Many poets who took themselves seriously but lacked perfect
self-sufficiency turned to the East for inspiration at some time or
other. W. B. Yeats did so in his old age, collaborating with an
Indian pundit in a translation of the Upanishads after first aban
doning his Celtic-Twilight for a brushed-up neo-American style,
and then dabbling in spiritualism. T. S. Eliot, too, introduced the
Buddhist keywords, Give, sympathize, controP, into The Waste
Land , the most famous poem of the period, and concluded the
poem with Shantih, shantih, shantih , the formal ending of a
Upanishad, meaning The Peace that passeth understanding .
There had been Mrs. Annie Besant and Madame Blavatsky,
European students of Indian esoteric thought. There was now
Krishnamurti, an Indian student of these European students of
Indian thought. He had a large following in Germany and Britain
in the Twenties and was reckoned the most distinguished foreigner
in Holland after the ex-Kaiser thousands went from England to
his holiday preaching-camps. Then Yoga was introduced into
Britain by a few civil servants and soldiers who had served in India.
Major-General Fuller, who was one of those responsible for devel
oping the theory of tank warfare, and later a Fascist candidate at a
London Borough election, wrote on it at length. He defined Yoga
as a means of deliverance from worldly illusions. The Yogi s maxim
was: Stop thinking and get beyond or behind consciousness and
you will discover the meaning of Reality in super-consciousness.
The practice of the Yogi consisted in diverting his organs of sense
from everyday objects and concentrating them on his inner self, in
which was to be found a world of unity and rest. In this way the
illusions of the various and changing world were avoided. Sensual
pleasures, including those of sex, were to be denied. As for women,
Major-General Fuller remarked in a footnote, they are considered
ART, LITERATURE, AND RELIGION 191
beyond the possibility of redemption, for in the order of reincarna
tion they are placed seven stages below a man, three below a camel,
and one below a pig. Gerald Heard, a writer on scientific subjects,
concluded a book at the end of the Thirties, Pain, Sex and Time,
with an explanation of how Yoga could help Western men to reach
peace within their inner selves; and Aldous Huxley was another
student of the subject. The advantage of Yoga over the Catholic
Church, for men at least, was that not only did it forbid the devotee
to think, but he remained his own confessor, Pope, and Deity.
C. E. M. Joad, a popular philosopher, who throughout the
Twenties was the typical anti-ideal Realist, published in 1933
Counter Attack from the East, in which he surprisingly expounded
the philosophy of the Indian Professor S. Radhakrishnan, of Ox
ford University. He began by defining the contemporary situation
in Europe in the words of one of the characters in Bernard Shaw s
Too True to be Good: I stand mid-way between youth and age
like a man who has missed his train: too late for the last one and
too early for the next. ... I have no Bible, no creed: the war
has shot both out of my hands. ... I am ignorant: I have lost my
nerve and am intimidated; all I know is that I must find the way of
life for myself and all of us, or we shall surely perish. . . . Europe s
ruin, he continued, would surely be brought about either by
another war or by the collapse of the economic system, which was
unable to distribute equitably what it produced. European nations
ought to take a leaf out of the book of the East and, instead of
perpetually acting, learn to sit back and feel. European activity led
nowhere. In writing and in the arts the flowing river of inspiration
seems to have trickled away into the backwaters of formlessness,
discord and experimentation for its own sake. Philosophy was out
of touch with life. Science could provide the means of satisfying
people s desires, but it assumed no responsibility for distinguishing
between good and bad desires. People were hostile to established
religion, and yet in need of faith, for the hedonism of the early
Twenties had been proved unsatisfying.
As a remedy, Joad proposed the intuitive approach , by which
he meant the thorough investigation and control of feelings. This
had always been the teaching of Eastern philosophers, and Joad
claimed that Radhakrishnan could carry out the function of a
liaison-officer between the traditional inner tranquility of the East
192 ART, LITERATURE, AND RELIGION
and the materialistic energy of the West. The work of liaison was
already being rather ineffectively carried out by a magazine, the
Aryan Path y founded in 1930 in order to bring together the tradi
tions of East and West. Indian doctrines could never make much
headway in England, however, where among the governing class
the prejudice against Indians as "lessor breeds within the law had
persisted since Kipling s time; though they were popular among the
working class, which found them generous and gentlemanly.
In the same class with Joad as a popular prophet was J. Middle-
ton Murry, who began the Peace as the editor of the Athenaeum,
then turned for relief from barren intellectualism to the rich mystic
ism taught by the Russian Ouspensky, and the semi-monastic
group-life of Gudjieff s Institute at Fontainebleau. Shortly after his
wife, Katherine Mansfield, the most gifted and careful short-story
writer of the Twenties in the Russian, not American, style died
at the Institute of consumption, he recanted much of his modern
istic mysticism, rediscovered Christ, founded the earnest, popular,
New Adelphij and began to hail his spiritual affinities among the
English poets, especially Keats, Blake, and Shakespeare. He inter
preted Blake, for example, as teaching that the stifling grip of intel-
lectualized life had to be defeated by a revolution of uninhibited
feeling, before a just balance between feeling and thinking could
be established. Murry saw a materialistic counterpart to this in
Communism, and urged that real, or Christian, Communism would
combine political revolution with revolution within people s indi
vidual selves. He continued his lay preaching throughout the
period: growing more and more ecclesiastical in touch, and
with an increasingly woolly following. He ended as a prominent
pacifist.
Not only Indian and Russian, but Chinese thought was stirring
the British mind. Confucius and Lao-tse were no longer names of
reference, but were seriously studied; the Cambridge critic, I. A.
Richards, wrote on Mencius. The attraction of the Chinese was
their sensitivity of feeling, their moral criticality, their detachment
from contemporary events. These qualities were most easily as
similable from the Chinese poems, translated immediately after the
war by Arthur Waley into firm and unpretentious English. There
was even a solid appreciation of Taoism, which preached the virtue
of bowing before every storm, running away from every enemy
ART, LITERATURE, AND RELIGION 193
or argument and cultivating the domestic virtues. It fitted in well
with the anti-war talk of the late Twenties and early Thirties.
The only notable revival of simple Christianity in the period was
known as the Oxford Group movement. This had been founded
in the early Twenties by Frank Buchman, an American minister
of religion, who ran it on American advertising lines. The name
"Oxford Group 5 was a stroke of advertising genius: it provided a
respectable academic ring and recalled the serious Oxford Move
ment of mid- Victorian times. In point of fact, Oxford University
had no more to do with the movement than the Eiffel Tower with
the well-advertised Eiffel Tower Lemonade. A smart, not to say
disingenuous, method of propaganda was for its members to write
privately to leading politicians and other public men, asking them
whether they agreed with certain simple religious formulas; their
favourable replies were then used as active endorsements of the
Oxford Group. The movement was slow to gather momentum until
1931, but had by that time gained the support of a number of
earnest Anglican clergymen, who saw it as a means of infusing life
into the ritual-ridden Church.
By 1932 it had begun to attract newspaper attention. The Daily
Express published a series of articles by young men on the revival
of religious feeling. H. W. ( Bunny ) Austin, the tennis champion,
wrote: 1 believe that Christ was neither meek nor mild, nor frail, but
a man magnificently built, tall and strong, and that His mind was
even stronger than His body. . . . By the quickness and the keen
ness of His brain all those who argued with Him were outwitted
and subdued. This was an improvement on the Muscular Chris
tianity theory of the late nineteenth century. Austin s lead was
followed by Godfrey Winn, ex-actor and sentimental columnist,
who described how he had re-learnt the value of prayer. Never be
fore, he said, had he had the courage to confess even to his most
intimate friends that he believed in God. He concluded with: c The
dull routine of our daily job takes on a new significance, assumes a
beauty and importance undreamt of before, if we consider it from
the angle of service to God. Preachers had been saying this for
nearly two thousand years, but it was a new thing for a star col
umnist to say so. James Douglas, the calvinistic editor of the Sunday
Express, found in these articles signs of c the dawn of a new day
breaking .
194 ART > LITERATURE, AND RELIGION
The Daily Express then devoted an article to The Buchmanites
Come to Town , in which their first group in London was de
scribed. The Express reporter found them healthy, hearty, athletic
young men". A fuller picture of Group activities was given in a
book by A. J. Russell, For Sinners Only, which was selling widely
in 1932. As one of the Groupist songs put it:
It s not an institution,
It s not a point of view,
It starts a revolution
By starting it in you!
Russell said that, in Coleridge s words, the Group was out to
restore commonplace truths to their first uncommon lustre by trans
lating them into action. Its members were to live Christianity, and
emphasize practice more than preaching. One of their practices
was to share confessions of their sins; this was supposed to provide
a healthy, common-sense way of solving personal problems by dis
cussion. Their central belief was that God had a guiding plan for
everyone s life. One of their sayings was: There is always from
God concrete, adequate, accurate information on any subject at
any time. When people spoilt God s plan by sinning, He was
always ready with a new one. In the early mornings Group mem
bers held Quiet Times , in which they Hstened-in to God , made
petitions, and waited for guidance. By submitting their will to God
every morning, they hoped to build up a real co-ordinated life for
each day. The Group recommended that its members should keep
a guidance book , in which to record the thoughts that arose while
listening-in to God.
The aim of the Group was to change people s lives, on the
theory that world-problems could only be settled by the personal
reform of everybody. When people were changed , shared their
problems, and listened-in to God for guidance , problems disap
peared; the desire for sexual sin no longer existed if the will was in
God s charge, but like all other psychological errors could be richly
sublimated. Money troubles, too, could be solved: Russell quoted
several instances of changed people who had prayed hard to God
for a cheque by the next post, and had actually got it.
Frank Buchman, the Groupist Fuehrer, was described in Harold
Begbie s Life-Changers as a young-looking man of middle life, tall,
ART, LITERATURE, AND RELIGION 195
upright, stoutish, clean-shaven, with that mien of scrupulous sham
pooed and almost medical cleanliness or freshness, which is so char
acteristic of the hygienic American . Begbie went on to tell how
Group members looked upon him. C I am tempted to think that if
Mr. Pickwick had given birth to a son \_sic} and that son had emi
grated to America he would have been not unlike this amiable and
friendly surgeon of souls. Fuller acquaintance of "F.B." brings to
one s mind the knowledge that in spite of his boyish cheerfulness he
is one of the house and lineage of all true mystics from Plotinus to
Tolstoy/
The Group directed its main drive against the upper-middle
classes. For a time it enjoyed a vogue at the universities ironically
enough, chiefly at Oxford. Its success among titled people was ad
vertised, just as with cosmetics. Special Group week ends were
held in the country, and only those who could afford to go away
for week ends attended. Though Buchman had plans for starting
groups in factories, his movement scarcely affected working-class
people. It appealed to those with an uneasy intellectual background,
precisely because it was not an intellectual movement, but one of
earnest, gentlemanly and restful comradeship.
A bid in Britain for the religious support of the less prosperous
classes, from which, in the United States, she derived her chief sup
port, was made by the American evangelist Aimee Semple McPher-
son, who arrived in 1928 with a large company of * Angels and
rented the Albert Hall for a meeting of her Four Square Gospel
Alliance. She and the angels were beautifully garbed; but the Albert
Hall, which was only half full, did not yield the same theatrical
effect of glory as her Temple at Los Angeles. She retold Bible
stories in the American vernacular which the cinema had trained
her audience to understand, and persuaded them to sing:
Thou, the rose of Sharon,
Let thy praises roll!
Lily of the valley,
Flower of my soul/
All those for whom Jesus was the lily of the valley were asked to
raise their yellow hymn books in the air when they came to the last
line of the song. All did. Then they sang:
196 ART, LITERATURE, AND RELIGION
Tve been "listening-in" to Heaven,
And IVe had a glorious time,
I have heard such wondrous singing,
And the music it was fine.
But the show was not quite good enough to compensate for the
empty seats, and she omitted the note of Hell and Damnation which
an evangelist must use in such circumstances; besides, the Anglican
Church did not support her. She went home unsuccessful.
Religious people in England in 1927 and 1928 were concerned
with the controversy over the revised Prayer Book. A Royal Com
mission on Ecclesiastical Discipline had been appointed in 1901 to
inquire into the divergent High and Low Church practices in
ceremonial. It found in favour of bringing the Prayer Book, by
revision, into closer relation both with modern needs and with the
advances in liturgical scholarship which had revealed deficiencies
in the existing Prayer Book from the point of view of traditional
Christian worship. Letters of Business were then granted to Con
vocation by the Government to proceed with revision. The war
interrupted the Bishops labours, but in 1927 a revised Prayer Book
was finally produced. What it did was to undo the drastic 1552
Protestant revision of the 1 549 edition. Immediately, however, the
Low-Church part of the community protested against the Rome-
ward tendency of the Church of England. The new Prayer Book
was assailed as Anglo-Catholic for introducing Mass vestments, the
wafer at Communion services, the eastward position and the mixed
chalice, and for encouraging Mariolatry by giving special collects,
epistles and gospels for three additional festivals of the Virgin. The
House of Lords would have accepted the new Book, but the Com
mons rejected it, chiefly by the vote of its Northern Irish and Scot
tish members.
That either House had the right to decide on the matter was
strange: for although, among the Lords, Anglicans predominated,
there were a number of Catholic peers; and in the Commons a great
many Dissenters, Catholics, Jews, and infidels. But Protestantism
was the State religion and there were therefore remarkably few
abstentions from voting, even though it was a non-party measure:
the members had their duty to their constituents to consider. In
1928 a modified version was drafted, which the Lords again ac
cepted; but in the Commons the House Secretary, Sir William
ART, LITERATURE, AND RELIGION 197
Joynson-Hicks, led the attack against it. He was an ardent Low
Churchman, and had already written a book against revision, The
Prayer Book Crisis. Largely because of his attacks, the new Prayer
Book was again rejected by the Commons. There was nothing then
for the Bishops to do but to give permission if they chose, each in
his own diocese, for certain parts of the book to be used. The
Church had been saved from officially taking a Romeward step,
but that did not prevent incumbents from conducting services as
they wished. The old principle of compromise had been re-estab
lished in the State religion at least: Anglicanism was all things to
all men, and if congregations objected to processions and candles
and incense and other mediaeval revivals, they could always take
car or bus to a neighbouring church where services were so low
as to suggest a perpetual Good Friday. But the institutions or private
people in whose gift the livings were, usually took pains to keep
a parish at the level of Churchdom which its parochial council
demanded.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Education and Ethics
The failure of the Churches to hold younger and more progressive-
minded people even in weekly lip-service to the notion of Christen
dom; the knocking away by Einstein and his popularists of the
lynch-pin of geometric absoluteness which held the conventional
universe together; the loss of any sense of the immediate present in
the gap between the Futures of, which were pouring from the
Press, and the encyclopedic popular Histories of in monthly parts
all this was thoroughly unsettling. You are all a lost generation/
Gertrude Stein had said pertinently to the younger survivors of the
war, who included such diverse characters as the Prince of Wales
and Lawrence of Arabia. Those of the lost generation who had
children were determined that these must not suffer as they them
selves had from their upbringing, but must have as healthy and
happy a childhood as possible and be encouraged from the first to
become industrious and responsible citizens of the world. As a hope
ful start, mothercraft had recently been raised to an exact science
by the meticulous Dr. Truby King. It was generally felt that the
muddle into which the world had got itself could not be straight
ened out in our time , so that the chief hope lay in the next genera
tion.
The Twenties were a great time for well-to-do children never
before had such attention been lavished on them nor parental con
trol been so light. It was also a great time for educationalists, espe
cially for psychologically minded ones who had learned from the
case-books what terrible consequences might follow an early
thwarting of a libido. Conventional British education before the
war had been exceedingly repressive in all varieties of school, ex
cept the Froebel kindergarten, and school subjects were generally
taught in a way that bored and repelled.
198
EDUCATION AND ETHICS 199
The new school movement, which was an extension of Froe-
bel s theories and Madame Montessori s system for correcting
defective and delinquent children, had three main features co
education, encouragement to children to express their natural feel
ings and abilities, no punishments- A great many parents who
looked back on their own schooldays with loathing and could
afford the high fees that new schools were forced to demand sent
their children to them. Even if they learned nothing they would at
least be happy there and given the right number of calories and
vitamins by a modern catering staff. This influence was soon felt
by the more conventional preparatory schools, which now im
proved food, lightened discipline, rationalized clothes, and re
formed in so many ways that the child no longer wept miserably
on each return to school after the holidays. They could not break
away altogether from school subjects, since they had to accommo
date themselves to the demands of the public schools. The new
schools came up against the same problem and usually compromised
by providing conventional classes for children who would eventu
ally have to matriculate or pass other examinations.
Thus, as with the Churches, there was remarkable variation in
scholastic ritual between neighbouring establishments. A few con
tinued to give their pupils heavy Victorian food to eat and heavy
Victorian clothes and hats to wear; teach them little but the
Classics, mathematics, Scripture, and a little French; make crimes of
small offences; and rout them out of bed early with the clang of the
school bell for long and listless prayers. At the other end of the
scale there were Libertarian schools where problem children did
just what they liked and when they liked (the teachers merely
making suggestions and taking notes), even to the point of break
ing windows, writing up dirty words on the walls, running about
naked. The problem children were those who had started with a
conventional education, but had reacted to it unco-operatively .
Usually they were the children of problem parents. A. S. NeilTs
school, Summerhill, specialized in children of this kind. At one time
it was full of thieves and truants who went there because it was
the only place that would accept them. Neill had himself cherished
a resentment against his own repressive Scottish education: he had
come to abominate the Classics, suspecting anyone who had any
liking for them, and used to strop his razor on a leather-bound
200 EDUCATION AND ETHICS
family Bible, not altogether from thriftiness. As he wrote in 1937
in his book, That Dreadful School, he wished to make Summerhill
fit the children and not the children the school. He was a kindly
and generous man and gave everyone at Summerhill equal rights,
no matter what age they might be. All were free and undisciplined
and expressed their natures to the full. He counted as his greatest
discovery the fact that children were born sincere, and remained
so unless warped by conventional education. Some turned out
sincerely good, a few stayed sincerely bad. Everything got broken.
The Hon. Bertrand Russell, Mathematician, Einstein expositor,
advocate of complete sexual freedom another man with a grudge
against his education and his Libertarian wife Dora Russell ran
another famous free school: it did not go quite so far as Summer-
hill and contained fewer delinquents. The Russells considered that
the true object of education was not to instil certain beliefs into
children, but to stimulate in them the power of independent judge
ment. Instruction was not so important as the development of per
sonality ; children could always pick up book-knowledge later.
Dora Russell s In Defense of Children, published in 1932, main
tained that a child s education was best advanced by the observa
tion of real things: plants, flowers, animals, chemicals, food, colours,
its own body. It should be allowed to express its feelings freely
about these things, so that when it became an adult it would be a
whole person , not the conventional type whose emotional forces
were repressed. She wrote: We need to start with male and female
children together in nursery schools that are absolutely frank about
sexual differences; then to let the children go on growing up to
gether, providing for each one opportunities as an individual with
out neglecting the difference of sexual interest.
The chief defect of these free schools was that the child did not
stay there permanently, but went home on holiday for some five
months of the year and immediately came into conflict with repres
sive social discipline, at the hands of neighbours and relatives, if
not of its parents. It reacted sharply, caused a deal of trouble; and
sometimes wept each time it left school for home.
Before the war the British educational system had been one of
the clearest expressions of the class-structure of society. There were
elementary schools, religious or secular, for the poor; dame-schools
and Grammar or Cathedral schools for the trading classes; and
EDUCATION AND ETHICS 2OI
preparatory and public schools for the governing classes. The leav-
ing- a g e of the elementary school was from twelve to fourteen; of
the Grammar school, fifteen to seventeen; of the public school,
seventeen to nineteen. Above these were the Universities: Oxford,
Cambridge and Dublin in one grade and the rest 7 in another. These
social gradings were gradually being altered by extensions of State-
aided education. H. A. L. Fisher, the historian, President of the
Board of Education in 1917, had sponsored the Education Act of
1918 which aimed at filling the numerous gaps in adolescent educa
tion. Fisher s plan was to keep all children in full-time attendance
at school until the age of fourteen, to provide practical and ad
vanced instruction for the older ones and when they left school to
provide them with compulsory part-time education up to the age
of sixteen, and subsequently up to eighteen. These new continua
tion schools were abandoned in the post-war slump. This Act also
oifered grants to nursery schools, intended to start good social
habits in the children of busy mothers from an early age. Nor was
this provision much of a success: by the end of 1937 only ninety
such schools, with accommodation for seven thousand children,
had been recognized for the grant. They were often attached to
girls secondary schools and were supposed to train the elder girls
in mother-craft.
Further educational progress during the period was mainly due
to prodding by the Labour Party, at whose instance, in January
1924, the Consultative Committee of the Board of Education re
considered the whole problem of elementary education. The Com
mittee s findings ( The Hadow Report of 1926) were that primary
education for all children should end at the age of eleven and that
a second stage should then begin, which should as far as possible
be regarded as a single whole, within which there will be a variety
of types of education. These types would comprise Secondary
(Grammar) schools, trade schools, junior technical and junior art
schools, and also two grades of Central (Modern) school This
policy was generally adopted and many new Central schools were
built. The extension of bus services and the loan of bicycles made
them accessible to children even in the deepest country; and in
many cases hot dinners were supplied cheap from the school kitchen.
But there was much opposition to the compulsory detention
of children at school until the age of fifteen, and such difficulty in
202 EDUCATION AND ETHICS
financing the new Church Central Schools, which were to complete
the scheme, that it was not until 1936 that the necessary legislation
was passed. The date chosen for the introduction of the new scheme
was Sept. i, 1939 the day, as it turned out, that mass-evacuation
of school-children from vulnerable areas began and it was post
poned until after the war.
Some Grammar schools were content to remain in their original
social class and admit the infiltration of working-class children;
others moved up into the public-school category, by bringing them
selves into the definition of Public Schools made in 1899 by the
historian of Winchester College: Boarding Academies for young
gentlemen, drawn from all parts of the country. If they had no
boarders before they usually installed a few and became officially
eligible to the title of Public School by substituting Officers
Training Corps for the old Boys Brigade companies. Or their head
masters were elected to sit on the National Headmasters Confer
ence an honour, reserved for those who were free to organize
their schools internally as they pleased, which automatically carried
with it public-school dignity, whether there were boarders or no.
The seven original public schools Eton, Harrow, Winchester,
Rugby, Westminster, Charterhouse and Shrewsbury swelled to
hundreds, and only a technical difference existed between the tail
of this column and the head formed by the new secondary and
technical schools.
High schools for girls had the same social choice to make as the
Grammar schools; whether to raise fees and admit only ladies or
come under the secondary school system and get Government sup
port. Social distinctions began to blur, in both girls and boys
schools: for war-profiteers sent their children to rub shoulders
with the children of the aristocracy, and working-class children in
considerable numbers succeeded not only in winning scholarships
at secondary schools but in being elected to university scholarships.
The excuse for the public school, where the teaching even on the
Modern Side was in general so formal and dispiriting as to encour
age most boys to concentrate all their energies in games or out-of-
school interests, was that it taught character . The dormitory
houses were, on the whole, self-governing republics of bovs, who
regarded the masters as strangers, unfit for any confidences; and
painfully inoculated each new generation with the Spartan virtues
EDUCATION AND ETHICS 203
of modesty, reticence, endurance, courage, generosity, loyalty, per
sonal cleanliness, and general decency general decency meant not
taking unfair advantage of a superior position. With the Spartan
virtues went the Spartan prejudice against all things artistic, eccen
tric, abstract, poetic, studious, foreign or feminine. A certain soften
ing of this attitude was noted in the Twenties; and after the De
pression of 1931 most parents had to insist on their boys taking the
School Certificate, which was a pre-requisite for an increasing num
ber of appointments, so that there was less downright idleness in
class. But the scene in a boys common-room of any well-known
public school on, say, a wet Sunday afternoon in July 1939 was
indistinguishable except that the radio had succeeded the gramo
phone and the taboo against the use of Christian names had relaxed
from the scene in 1909.
Perhaps the greatest single benefit to British education of recent
times had been Fisher s scheme, later known as The Burnham
Scales , which took the fixing of teachers salaries in elementary,
secondary and technical schools out of the niggardly hands of local
authorities and made it a national affair. With the rise in salaries,
the profession at once began to attract more intelligent people, and
the level of teaching to rise appreciably. Part-time education was
also being extended, by means of evening classes in technical col
leges run by local authorities, and by adult education movements.
In 1934 more than two million students were enrolled in England
and Wales at part-time classes.
New experiments in education included the use of broadcasting
and films as a means of teaching. Of all the activities of the B.B.C.,
broadcasting to schools was the least criticized and the most gen
erally welcomed. Miss Mary Somerville, who ran this department
throughout the period, did not wish to put any ordinary school
teachers out of jobs by competitive teaching of school subjects, but
rather to supplement the ordinary curriculum with special talks by
experts on this and that.
Education authorities as time went on gave not only permission
for broadcasts to be incorporated in the schools curriculum, but
also grants for the purchase of receivers, licenses, and the B.B.C.
pamphlets. By the end of the period some 1 1,000 elementary and
secondary schools in England, Wales, and Scotland were listen
ing-in. The talks were looked forward to as treats, as were the
204 EDUCATION AND ETHICS
educational films to which schools were admitted in morning show
ings at local cinemas. Some schools were buying their own projec
tors and holding weekly shows in the school hall. One of the main
activities of the British Film Institute, founded in 1933, was to
encourage educational films. Some of the best of these were made
by Gaumont British Instructional, dealing with such natural-history
subjects as Tawny Owl and Rock Pools . The first British instruc
tional film on history was directed by J. B. Holmes for this com
pany in 1935. It was called Mediaeval Village , and showed pic-
torially the mediaeval system of land tenure and the rotation of
crops, as they still survived in a remote Nottinghamshire village.
Instructional films on Imperial subjects were also rented out by the
Empire Film Library. Most of them had been made for the Empire
Marketing Board.
The formation of O.T.C. companies by grammar schools as a
means of social elevation had its ironical side, because it was con
current with a widespread anti-militarist movement. This began
with the Labour Party, who were not only against the class-war
but against Imperialistic wars conducted by the privileged classes;
and in industrial districts where they controlled local government
the Labour men could back up their private opinions by overt acts.
In 1927 the pacifist Housing Committee of Sheffield City Council
refused to grant permission for a squadron of the Queen s Own
Yorkshire Dragoons to drill on Sunday mornings on the Langley
Housing Estate. This council had already abolished the O.T.C.
company attached to the local King Edward VII School, and set
going a general attack on O.T.C.s as fostering militarism in the
young. The schools that were not forced to abolish theirs sent in
creasingly thinner detachments to the annual summer camps at
Aldershot and on Salisbury Plain. War memorials and war trophies
also grew unpopular: bands of ex-Servicemen were reported to be
throwing German gun relics into rivers at night, and a move was
made in 1928 to demilitarize Armistice Day. The Rev. H. Dunnico,
M.P., said that fewer ex-Servicemen attended the celebrations each
year, because they felt cynical about the prospects of peace. He
suggested that a World Fellowship Day should be held instead.
General Sir Ian Hamilton, who had commanded the British Expe
dition to Gallipoli, urged that Armistice Day should continue, but
only in order to remind people, as they paused in the nation-wide
EDUCATION AND ETHICS 205
Two Minutes Silence, how disastrous the war had been, and to
reinforce their determination that it should never occur again.
There was a similar tendency in France, where the rising tide of
Socialism was damping the military spirit. The Sunday Express
greeted as a notable step towards appeasement the news that the
French police had forbidden the use of the word boche in French
films allemand was to be substituted.
The disarmament question was canvassed in 1927, when an
Anglo-American naval conference was held. It failed because
Britain on Churchill s advice, it is said was unwilling to concede
mathematical parity to the Americans. Thereupon Viscount Cecil
resigned from the Government: he was the chief British advocate
of disarmament and of co-operation between countries by means
of the League of Nations. The public was nevertheless encouraged
to feel that the era of perpetual peace was at hand when the Kellogg
Pact was signed in 1928. The Daily News observed: A move to
outlaw war throughout the world is the hopeful note on which the
New Year opened. The draft of a treaty for the outlawry of war
between the U.S. and France . . . contains a provision that it shall
be open to other powers to add their signatures. . . . The inten
tion is that the treaty should be only the first step towards a world
wide prohibition of war as a means of settling international differ
ences. Britain added its signature to this pact, and so did most other
countries; but the statesmen who signed it were perhaps more
aware than the public of the uselessness of denunciations of war,
unaccompanied by any practical safeguard against it.
War-books suddenly came back into fashion in 1928-9: but to
debunk rather than glorify. The fashion started in Germany with
Erich Maria Remarque s unbalanced All Quiet on the Western
Front and Stefan Zweig s The Case of Sergeant Grischa. All Quiet
took second place in German best-selling records after the Bible,
but was later displaced by Hitler s Mein Kampf. As soon as All
Quiet and Sergeant Grischa, in both of which soldiers were shown
not as heroes but as uncomplaining victims of universal disaster, had
been serialized in the British Sunday papers, the public was ready
to read the same sort of story from the British side, and to see it
dramatized on the stage. The greatest stage success of 1929 was
R. C. Sheriff s Journey s End , a realistic study of the reactions of
several men in a dug-out to war conditions; there were no women
206 EDUCATION AND ETHICS
in the cast. A number of British war-books became best-sellers.
Richard Aldington s strident Death of a Hero denounced love-cant
and war-cant with the necessary Continental fierceness, but Ed
mund Blunden s restrained Undertones of War and Siegfried Sas-
soon s wistful Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man had a strong literary
flavour. Robert Graves s Good-bye to All That, another best-seller
of the time, was neither a war-book nor literary, but a reckless auto
biography in which the war figured, written with small considera
tion for anyone s feelings.
These four writers were all in the first place poets. Aldington
practised Imagism , an American free-verse fashion which avoided
the abstract, mystical and conventionally poetic by limiting itself
in Chinese style to clear pictorial images. Siegfried Sassoon, whose
Counter Attack has already been mentioned, had settled down to a
dormant bachelor life, with eruptions of satiric pebbles and ash, but
no longer the old lava. Blunden had risen to be the most com
mended nature poet of the period, but sacrificed the initial ad
vantage that he derived from his country breeding by becoming a
professor of English literature, first at Tokyo and then at Oxford,
and not keeping his poems separate from his literary studies. Graves
had been a Georgian and later in his Poetic Unreason and other
critical essays had set a fashion in psychological analysis of the
effect on readers of various poetic devices. He was now declaring
his intention of becoming a poet in a more responsible sense: con
sidering the intrinsic truth of his statements rather than their prob
able appeal to anthology readers.
A more famous war-book than any of these was T. E. Law
rence s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, a personal history of the Arab
Revolt against the Turks, which he had largely directed. It appeared
in a shortened trade version in 1936 to cover the expense of the full,
illustrated limited edition published in the next year. The full
edition was issued at 30 a copy to subscribers but copies were
soon selling at 600. Lawrence had written the book straight off
in 400,000 words immediately after the war, painfully rewritten
it when the manuscript was stolen, and then for years tinkered
away at it, trying to convert a workmanlike and highly exciting
story into a literary monument. Lawrence had been an archaeolo
gist before the war, had refused an O.M. and an earldom for his
war services, and then, after seeing justice done to the Arabs in the
EDUCATION AND ETHICS 2OJ
matter of Iraq and Trans Jordan, found his mind revving at an
uncomfortably high speed. He enlisted in 1922 under the name of
Shaw in the Royal Air Force: as a means of curing himself by
enforced discipline as one might go into a lay monastery . After a
time an officer recognized him and sold the news-story to the Daily
Express for 30: questions were asked in Parliament as to what he
was doing in the R.A.F. under an assumed name, and he was forced
to quit after six months service. He enlisted under the name of
Ross in the Royal Tank Corps, but was quietly permitted to return
to the R.A.F. two years later. He remained in the ranks until his
discharge in 1935: where his mechanical genius revolutionized the
design of motor torpedo-boats, his powers of organization made a
brilliant success of the Schneider Trophy meet in 1931, and his
influence with Air Marshals righted a good many wrongs of his
fellow-aircraftmen. Lawrence was a man of extraordinary powers
and with a constant temptation to use them experimentally. He
both despised and loved the legend that surrounded him, could not
be constant either to his friends or himself. He wrote of himself
what the man tormented with devils told Jesus: My name is
Legion, for we are many/ His long self-humiliation in the R.A.F.
made him forget after a time that he was a fellow of All Soul s and
the son of an Irish baronet. It tempted him to reject deliberately
the first rate in literature and art in favour of the second and third
rate, as too inside and aristocratic. He began to idealize the little
man , in the sense of lower-middle class John Citizens of whom
R.A.F. mechanics were largely made, and who in Germany and
Italy were the backbone of the Fascist and Nazi revolutions; even
played with the idea of himself becoming a dictator. If he had not
been killed in a road-accident shortly after his discharge he would
have found the temptation to strong political action almost irre
sistible.
The minds of the two Lawrences, D. H. and T. E., were repre
sentative of much that was happening in this confused epoch of
thought and feeling. Both felt absolute liberty to range in their
mental emotions wherever they pleased; but as soon as they re
turned to themselves were disappointed to find nobody at home but
a little naked manikin. T. E. was no less content during his last
R.A.F. years with his mechanic s "bits and pieces than D.H. in
New Mexico with Susan the cow s teats, but it was a makeshift
208 EDUCATION AND ETHICS
contentment in both cases. What secretly irked them was the ques
tion of Woman whom they could neither do with nor without.
Woman seemed to interfere with their freedom of spirit; yet this
freedom they felt exhausting and terrifying. Where was the par
ticular woman to reassure them that they were not frauds, that all
male aspirations and conquests were not fraudulent? Yet if that
woman had appeared and subsequently told them that very thing,
they would have called her a liar. T. E. sent Robert Graves an
obituary notice on himself just before his death, in which he
remarked, with some satisfaction, that being a mechanic cut him
off from all real communication with women there were no
women in the machines, in any machine no woman could under
stand a mechanic s happiness in serving his bits and pieces. He added
that all this reads like a paragraph of D. H. L., my step-namesake .
The chief difference between the two Lawrences was that T. E.
had a healthy mind and body and deliberately fell short of the best
from a proud Irish scruple against perfection; D. H. was not only
unhealthy but spiritually blind and tried to overawe the best in
others by vulgar menaces.
T. E. Lawrence s abandonment of literary and artistic perfec
tionism, and his self-dedication to the machine was as if to say Ve
are getting too far from our base and straining our communications.
Let us consolidate here and wait for the main body to come up.
One thing at a time. This is the machine-age. Let us perfect the
machines, and honour the mechanics who are the real nation, and
who should count more than the scouts and outriders of the spirit .
This was a close interpretation of the national mood, as the Twen
ties waned. The chief aim was agreed to be a general spread of social
contentment by organizing industry to increase the standard of liv
ing of the common people so far at least as this was consistent
with the capitalistic system, which had to support a large rentier
class.
To begin with, there was a feeling that the human cogs of the
machine should be overhauled T. E. Lawrence had written of
himself, in the same obituary letter, as a cog in the machine, and
acjded that one of the benefits of being a part of the machine was
to learn that one didn t oneself matter. The National Institute of
Industrial Psychology was founded in 192 1, to determine what kind
of factory conditions would promote healthier and happier minds in
EDUCATION AND ETHICS 209
workers, and to urge their adoption by factory owners. The aim was
to consider the worker, the machine, and the task as one unit: not
only to discover how to improve the worker s health and his enjoy
ment of work, but at the same time to increase his output. Indus
trialists became patriarchal, rather in the sense that feudal land
owners had been, and set out to provide their workers with treats,
benefits, bonuses, sports clubs and even tied houses out of their
business profits. This avoided strikes, kept up a high level of skilled
work, and appeased their own consciences. It was found that the
most economic method of business was to plough in 7 excess profits
by investing money in the workers. Experiments in patriarchalism
had been made even before the war by Cadbury s the Quaker
chocolate makers; they were carried on by Lever s the soap-boilers,
Huntley & Palmer s the biscuit makers, and Lyons the tea-shop
proprietors; and had a great success in almost every instance. The
most notable setback was to Lord Leverhulme: when he tried
benevolent industrialization in the primitive Scottish Isle of Lewis,
the inhabitants refused to co-operate.
The General Strike of 1926 had two salutary results that offset
the ill effects of the artificial division of political thought into Left 7
and Right : in the first place it abashed the governing classes, as
its leaders had intended, by graphic demonstration of their depend
ence on the workers, in the second it abashed the working classes
by a graphic demonstration of their incapacity for combined action
even of a negative sort. The result was encouraging to the industrial
patriarch, and his example spread. It became bad form to grind the
faces of the poor, and if any particularly glaring instance of face-
grinding came to public attention, the big business man would find
himself shunned at his country-club or by his golfing acquaintances.
A large number of his kind had been educated at public schools,
if not also at universities, and so brought up in the noblesse oblige
ethics of the governing class, not in the all s fair in business ethics
of the small trader. If he had not had a gentleman s education, he
would secretly regret this as a business liability, and be the more
scrupulous in his gentility.
So it was that the wicked capitalist of Third International
dogma, who had been only too common in Karl Marx s time, began
to die out: in a great many industries he could not compete with
the benevolent sort. Where he survived he was in general less
210 EDUCATION AND ETHICS
wicked than unfortunate: he could not make his business pay well
enough to satisfy both his shareholders and his work-people. He
usually felt himself under a stronger obligation to his shareholders,
whose money he had borrowed and some of whom had no means
of livelihood but the dividends he paid, than to the work-people,
who at least could find other work if they did not want their faces
ground in his mine or factory. He felt no stronger moral obliga
tion to them, in fact, than to private tradesmen and taxi-drivers,
who also sold him their labour services in the open market. The
Daily Herald in the early Twenties made Wicked Capitalists of a
number of landowners who drew royalties from mines and rents
from the dilapidated houses of the miners. This attack overlooked
the divided allegiance of these landowners to the miners, their agri
cultural tenants, and their heirs. The agricultural side of the estates
was their earliest obligation, and because of land-tax, death-duties,
and a falling market for coal and agricultural produce, they saw
themselves on the way to ruin. Death-duties were 50 per cent of
the value of property, and if, as happened to some noble families,
three heads of the house died in rapid succession, very little of the
estate could remain unsold. Many peers had, however, converted
their estates into limited liability companies soon after death-duties
were first imposed: among them the Earl of Moray, Viscount
Novar, and the Duke of Buccleuch.
These companies were given power to trade in farming, fishing,
shooting, mining, oil and shale works, quarrying, forestry. (The
quest for oil in England had already begun in 1919. Reports were
published in the Daily Mail that oil had been struck in Derbyshire,
and that soon it would be produced in marketable quantities. Well-
boring continued for the next twenty years, but without profit.)
In some cases the peers concerned continued to direct their affairs
personally, but many, disgusted with democracy, left them in the
hands of lawyers, who could be counted on not to err greatly on
the side of generosity. One profitable source of income for northern
landowners dried up in 1930 when the Wall Street crash ruined the
American sportsmen who had annually taken over grouse-moors
at extravagant rents: they ceased to come and by 1932 sporting-gun
manufacturers were faced with ruin.
The Daily Herald had also frequently assailed the Ecclesiastical
EDUCATION AND ETHICS 211
Commissioners as supervisors of slum property who had a cynical
disregard of the poor. The Ecclesiastical Commissioners were acting
landlords of Church property, the profits from which went largely
to the upkeep of churches and cathedrals and the payment of small
stipends to struggling clergy. The meagre 3 per cent profit to
which they limited themselves was more than the property could
decently yield: it was a moral quandary.
It cannot be pretended that business ethics were irreproachable.
A good deal of business was done by personal contact at bars and
over luncheon tables, and on the golf course between rounds, the
conclusions being later confirmed by secretaries letters. This made
the atmosphere friendly and natural, but also gave large scope to
poker-play technique and exercise of personality. An intelligent
and forceful person who could persuade another into a one-sided
deal was called a good business man : so long as he avoided com
mitting his misrepresentation in black and white,
There were two serious financial crashes at the end of the
Twenties; both the men concerned were good business men .
James White was a self-made man, having started as a poor boy
from Rochdale, He worked with Beecham s, the pill and patent-
medicine manufacturers, and came to have a controlling interest in
the Beecham Trust which controlled Dunlop s the rubber firm.
He financed prize fights, bought a yacht for 30,000, and owned a
racing establishment his horses won at different times the Royal
Hunt Cup, the Cesarewitch, the Manchester Cup, and the Lincoln.
He ran secret cock-fights; worked at an opulent desk with gold
and silver fittings; always had his chef prepare lunch for twelve
though usually he had far fewer guests and tried his hand as a
theatrical producer. He rented a West End theatre for a season,
where he used to attend rehearsals and interfere with advice given
grotesquely in a Lancashire accent. On one occasion he hired a
special train to take himself and one friend to Manchester for the
opening of a play that he had financed. At midnight he distributed
5 notes to the station staff. In 1925, however, he was hit by the
return to the gold standard; he continued his extravagances, but
could not recover his financial position. In 1927 he committed
suicide by means of chloroform, leaving debts of 610,000. In a
last letter he wrote, I have been guilty of folly, but never refused
212 EDUCATION AND ETHICS
a pal . . . the world is nothing but a human cauldron of greed.
... It is one dark day after another. My soul is sickened by the
homage paid to wealth/
In 1929 came the crash of the Hatry group. Clarence Hatry was
not a picturesque figure like White, and so newspapers blamed him
more readily, though his crash affected comparatively few people.
He declared that his job was to harmonize opposing personalities ,
for business is not only a matter of finance but also of personal
relations perhaps the first time business had been admitted to be
such in court. He was convicted for having recorded fictitious and
valueless securities, and, with his four associates, condemned to a
long term of penal servitude. He was not a dishonest man, but
failed to get away with one of his deals, and so crashed. If he had
got away with it, no one would have known about his interim
juggling with figures, and no one would have suffered. On his
emergence from prison, a number of his former associates raised a
subscription for ham and showed him by every means in their power
that though he had broken the law, he had not offended business
ethics except in being caught out.
Bureaucratic ethics were altogether different. Bureaucrats pro
ceeded by filled-in forms, inter-departmental minutes, and formal
committee meetings. There was less personal contact, less smartness.
Bureaucratic work consisted not in closing favourable deals but in
doing things in orderly routine fashion. The good bureaucrat did
not need to have a conversationally powerful personality. He
needed to be punctilious in seeing that the proper forms were filled
up, the proper people notified and consulted: that, in fact, the
proper channels and formalities were used. The business concep
tion of goodwill , kept up by lunches, gifts, privileges extras
that had the same effect as bribes but were not given or taken as
bribes scarcely existed in bureaucracy, which was supposed to be
impersonal. Since courtesy-favours, except of the subtlest sort were
ruled out, real bribery was occasionally used and to more scandal
ous effect than any similar persuasion in business.
None the less, the bureaucratic system was elastic: influence
could be exerted by departmental heads in particular instances.
There is an eighteenth-century story of one noble member of the
privileged classes coming to another in the Ministry and asking
that, when candidates applied for a certain clerkship, a nominee of
EDUCATION AND ETHICS 2IJ
his own should, ceteris paribus, be chosen. Ceteris pctribus be
damned, the offended Minister cried, insulted. 1 have the gift of
this appointment/ That spirit was dead; but if one knew a depart
mental head, or someone high up , one could very often have a
personal note sent down by the Great Man to the underling con
cerned that, ceteris paribus, this or that action was recommended.
The sort of action would be granting a work-permit to a deserving
alien, withholding the criminal prosecution of an attempted suicide,
ear-marking a military cadet for a regiment with which he had
family connections, overriding a local government decision where
amenities were threatened. Only, no quid pro qua might be ac
cepted: the bureaucrat had to be scrupulously honest, and honesty
was a formalized honesty. In business it varied greatly between one
market and another, and even in different departments of the same
market. Advertising firms, for example, had three standards of
honesty a high standard in their dealings with the business firms
whose accounts they managed, a lower standard in stealing ac
counts from rival firms, and a still lower one in putting over
advertised goods on the public by misrepresentation.
The sharp difference between modern business morality and
that of the established gentry caused some confusion in country
districts where successful merchants took over the estates of im
poverished landowners and turned them into limited liability com
panies. The retainers were at first willing to transfer their allegiance
to the new families, but resented the impersonal touch, the reluct
ance for a long chat, the circular letters, the raising of rents to an
economic level, and especially the private investigations by secre
taries and agents, which they regarded as ungentlernanly spying .
It was no comfort to them that the third generation makes the
gentleman . They had ceased to think in such long terms as these.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Sport and Controversy
London s extraordinary prosperity, as the Twenties drew to their
close, was illustrated by the expansion of the restaurant trade: fash
ionable restaurants could afford to spend 50,000 on redecorating
every few years, and 12,000 yearly on dance-bands. When the first
boom in dancing began to die down in the middle Twenties,
cabaret came in, at a cost of anything up to 1,000 a week. The
success of these restaurants led to a change in London s clubland.
Since most young men worked by day, they counted on the
society of women for the evening; consequently more and more
men s clubs came to provide rooms where women could be enter
tained. Young men also wanted squash-courts and swimming baths,
as well as conversation and good wine; the elder clubs had to
modernize or die out. Original club-rules were relaxed in nearly
every case, in order to keep up membership. Married men were
allowed to join the Bachelors on payment of a small fine, and the
Travellers , for which the qualification had originally been that
every member must have travelled one thousand miles in a direct
line from London, came to admit many who had never been
farther than Paris. Political clubs loosened their party ties, and
cocktail bars were introduced into such strongholds as Whitens and
the St. James s. Park Lane changed even more remarkably than Pall
Mall: it ceased to be a street of large private houses for the nobility.
Vast hotels on the American model went up in their place and
seldom had empty rooms.
As has been related, the police had cracked down hard on the
London night-clubs in the late Twenties, but nothing could shake
the determination of visitors and residents to drink out of hours, or
the eagerness of the night-club world to profit from it. Something
else had to be thought of, and very soon the first private bottle
parties began to appear. It had been discovered that the law had
214
SPORT AND CONTROVERSY 215
no authority to interfere with the consumption of liquor or the
provision of dancing, music and other entertainment at a privately
convened party. So long as the organizer of such a party was a
host , and his customers guests and every drop of liquor on the
premises had been ordered within licensing hours from a wine
merchant by the host , the police were powerless. Bottle parties
were conducted at first with great strictness and discretion. To
gate-crash without a printed invitation was absolutely impossible
impossible, too, to secure a drink unless the order for it had
been personally placed for the guest by the host many hours before
his arrival. Naturally enough, the host s benevolence stopped far
short of gratuitous hospitality, and feeling obliged to ask for some
little help to meet his expenses over the pleasure of welcoming
so many friends he collected such help at the rate of 255. for a
bottle of whisky, 355. to 555. for inferior champagne, and 55. for
two rashers of bacon and an egg.
The early bottle parties were provided with first-class dance-
bands, irreproachably behaved waiters, and most luxurious prem
ises. They rarely opened before midnight, and rarely closed
before six or seven in the morning, when the last guests were
helped into waiting taxi-cabs. Soon, however, establishments ap
peared without pretensions either to luxury, decency, or good
service. Since the Lord Chamberlain could exercise no authority
over private entertainment, the semi-nude cabaret appeared, ac
companied by the frankly lewd song. Certain bottle-party estab
lishments gave free invitations to Soho negroes; for well-to-do
roisterers would pay huge sums for the excitement of sharing a
dance-band with these simply sensual people. Bottle parties were
generally beyond the means of younger society. Their clientele
seemed largely made up of the sort of business men who preferred
bank-rolls to cheque-books bookmakers, pools-promoters, Soho
vice kings, manufacturers from the provinces making whoopee
away from their families also amateur and professional prostitutes,
and simple adventurers in search of London s night life, including
a number of Army and Navy officers and Colonial officials on
leave. By the time the new war broke out, bottle parties in the
West End of London numbered some hundreds.
In fashion there was now a tendency to vary the sack-like .
tubular figure of the early Twenties by accentuating the shoulder
2l6 SPORT AND CONTROVERSY
angles and spreading out sleeves and skirts. In 1926 pleats were
rediscovered, but simple sports dresses were still so popular that
even sports evening gowns were sold. Every possible kind of
material was being used in shoes: snake-skin, lizard, crocodile, sea-
leopard, ostrich, zebra, dolphin, walrus, Siberian pony, and un
dipped calf -skin. General fashion changes included the introduc
tion of sun-glasses and deep-peaked eye shades for bathing, driving
and tennis; and silk Japanese sunshades stumpy in shape, like the
fashionable umbrella. Raincoats were no longer drab, but made in
bright colours, with checked and dotted patterns. Long Russian
boots were worn, but chiefly by business girls to keep their stock
ings from being splashed by passing cars Russian Boot Rosie,
Her feet are so cosy! Beauty treatment became more and more
common, and the Press was debating the morality of having faces
lifted and eyebrows plucked.
Interior decoration was now geometrical: the fashion came from
Paris, where the neglected beauties of Byzantine art had been redis
covered. Curves were soon held as vulgar in furniture as in the
human figure. The Jacobean barley-sugar twist was therefore aban
doned, even by the hire-purchase firms, in favour of unturned legs.
Modern chests-of-drawers, chairs, tables, beds, appeared in walnut
and light oak with provocatively obtuse instead of right angles,
looking as if bits had been chopped off them; even such fixtures as
lavatory basins, grates, and over-mantels went geometrical too.
This neo-Byzantbe style suited the unlovable New Age architec
ture the steel and concrete and Portland stone of Bush House and
the rebuilt Regent Street better than debased Renaissance. Steel
tubular furniture came from Paris in 1929, and before the end of
the Peace provided a brightly impersonal touch to all up-to-date
offices and consulting-rooms.
The same influence was affecting window-dressing: goods were
draped stiffly over cylinders and triangles, and the old realistic wax-
figures were being replaced in the advanced stores by flat papier-
mache ones, painted in silver, gilt, grey, black, and orange.
Window-dressing had become an art: smart shops no longer tried
to stuff as much as possible into their windows, but concentrated
on showing off effectively a few well-chosen things. Even sweet
shops succumbed to this fashion. Now, flattening one s nose against
the window where once lollipops, sugared almonds, caramels, and
SPORT AND CONTROVERSY 2 17
chocolate-creams had been paraded in serried ranks of jars, one saw
a mediaeval Chinese vase, full of expensive chrysanthemums, a wisp
of Persian embroidery and (following the composition line of the
design, as taught by professors of the Fine Arts) the eye travelled
eagerly to a very small closed carton on an antique silver salver, ,
containing presumably some extraordinary delectable pralines. But
one had learned that even this carton was a dummy it would
destroy the freshness and delicacy of the pralines to be exposed to
sunlight.
In 1927 the refeminizing tendency in women s fashions became
more marked. At Ascot a disastrously wet one at garden-parties,
and at theatres, long, frilled crinoline skirts were worn, made of
yards and yards of tulle. Everyone laughed and gasped to see
women going about in long skirts again: it seemed almost indecent.
But for ordinary wear masculine styles still prevailed sleeveless
waistcoats and cardigans, for instance, that matched the wearer s
suit and skirts remained short, though they had advanced two
inches from the ebb-tide mark of 1926. Geometrical designs, in the
form of applique pieces and insets, were displacing floral patterns.
Suits in varying tones of the same colour were worn, and this
fashion was also affecting interior decoration: walls were painted
or distempered in a degrade style, starting palely in one shade at
the top and growing deeper and darker toward the bottom, and
ceilings likewise were painted in colours. Women began to wear
ankle-socks with gaily coloured tops, for the most part not on bare
legs but over stockings. Hair was showing signs of becoming longer^
the shingle beginning to curl up at the back. Hat fashion was on the
move: at one time it was for wide-brimmed floppy hats, at another
for close-fitting helmet-like ones, named Crusader , Aviator , or
Lindbergh for Charles Lindbergh had just flown from New
York to Paris.
Flying was very popular with both sexes, now that there was
so high a standard of airworthiness in design and maintenance of
planes that crashes were the exception rather than the rule. The
Continental airways were regularly used by business men. There
was also a great increase in private flying, due to the development
of light aeroplanes and the founding of amateur flying clubs.
A new age of record-breaking began. Alan Cobham flew to
Capetown and back in May 1926, and to Australia and back in
2l8 SPORT AND CONTROVERSY
October. After the Australian flight his seaplane alighted on the
Thames by the Houses of Parliament, and he was officially wel
comed by a group of members headed by the Speaker. The hyster
ical excitement caused in the United States and the American
colony in Paris by Lindbergh s transatlantic flight was somehow
communicated to Britain: this flight was accepted unquestionably
as the greatest feat of a hundred years it is difficult to see why.
Counting airship crews, over a hundred persons had flown the
Atlantic before, though not solo; and far more spectacularly fool
hardy feats than Lindbergh s had been performed in America
BlondePs tightrope walk over the Niagara Falls is an easy instance.
The first woman pilot to fly the Atlantic was an American, Amelia
( Lady Lindy ) Earhart in 1928. All speed records were beaten by
Flight-Lieutenant Webster in his Schneider Contest plane that won
the International Trophy for Britain in 1927. It was won outright
in 1931. Great record-breaking hopes were also held out for the
new airships, the Rioo and RIOI, which were being built in 1928
at Howden.
Britain was anxious to gain and retain the Triple Crown , for
the fastest speed on sea, on land, and in the air. The land record
had been won in 1926 by Parry Thomas, whose racing car did 178
m.p.h. on Pendine Sands, Carmarthenshire. He was later killed on
the same sands, the chain of his car flying loose and strangling him.
In 1927 Henry Segrave and Malcolm Campbell were both trying
to be the first to reach 200 m.p.h. and in one attempt Campbell s
car, the Bluebird , nearly sank in the quicksands at Pendine. Segrave
was the most popular motorist of the day. His first experiments in
mechanics were with model railways: he built a special house to
contain an elaborate railway system with everything perfectly to
scale. Then he became famous by winning the Grand Prix de France
in 1923. Later he made attempts on the world speed records, both
on land and water: he won the first in 1929 with his ice-cooled
1,000 horse-power Golden Arrow on Daytona Beach, Florida, by
doing 231 miles an hour. Some days later he also beat Gar Wood s
speedboat record. (Gar Wood was an American speedster who
had earned the execration of British sportsmen by sinking with his
backwash a British competitor in a race it seemed deliberately.
That there was no written rule against the trick made it the more
heinous: the greater ingenuity of American sportsmen in keeping
SPORT AND CONTROVERSY 219
within the letter of the sporting code while infringing what the
British held to be the spirit was a great grievance. But we shall soon
come to the ironical sequel to this in the Body Line" controversy
in cricket.) It was when attempting to put up a new speedboat
record that Segrave who, like Cobham and Campbell, was knighted
for his feats met his death on Friday, i3th June 1930. He took
out his boat Miss England II on Lake Windermere; on his first
run he did 96 miles an hour and on his second 101 miles an hour.
On the third run, however, *Miss England IF shot up into the air,
then sank: the propeller-blades had caught some small drifting
object and snapped. Segrave was rescued, but with several ribs
smashed. He had just strength enough to ask Did we do it? and
saw his rescuers nod in reply, before he died.
The hot summer of 1928 popularized sunbathing. Bathing-
dresses therefore became much shorter, with low, sun-tan backs.
Most of them still had a little overskirt; the separated two-piece
suit had not yet come in. For use over bathing-dresses brightly
coloured, oilcloth beach-coats lined with towelling were worn; and
women s beach-pyjamas, also, of loose-fitting crepe-de-chine the
first publicly accepted form of sports-trousers for women. 1929
brought Mexican straw hats with wide brims, and suntan oil to
keep the skin from blistering. It was fashionable to be sunburnt
over as much of the body as possible though their piebald appear
ance in the nude secretly troubled most women. They extended
the tanned area by wearing no stockings on informal occasions,
though a suggestion that competitors in the Wimbledon Tennis
tournament might do the same caused a minor sensation.
Captain Webb had swum the Channel in mid-Victorian days, but
in the Twenties it was thought necessary to prove that this feat
was far less remarkable than it seemed, especially if one studied the
currents and the weather, and greased oneself all over, and kept
a boat handy to supply artificial stimulants. Between 1923 and 1926
several men swam the Channel, knocking hours off Webb s time.
In 1926 Miss Gertrude Ederle knocked two hours off the best male
record. Then six more women swam across, and by 1928 the thing
had become rather a bore, to be made fun of in the Cochran-
Coward revue, This Year of Grace . What ended it was a heavy-
handed joke by a Scottish woman doctor who brought public
attention to the fact that no official control was kept of these
220 SPORT AND CONTROVERSY
records by swimming a mile out to sea, then climbing into a boat
and allowing herself to be rowed across for all but the spectacular
last lap. This hoax upset everyone, especially Miss Ederle, who felt
her honour impugned: however, she performed a feat that even
Captain Webb had not attempted she swam the Straits of Gibral
tar, and under strict supervision too, careless of possible sharks.
The sun-bathing habit had a brightening effect on men s cloth
ing. Coloured sports-shirts and beach-shirts came in, worn with
open necks and no ties. Flannel and linen trousers appeared in
many colours, besides the staid and universal grey. These innova
tions were at first limited to the few chiefly to those who spent
their holidays at French resorts.
Slimming was now a cult. Tablets and potions of all kinds were
being sold as weight-reducers. Mechanical zoos appeared, with
electric camels, horses and chairs, which bounced the patient about
to irregular rhythms. Courses in physical training were given, and
many people adopted the habit of doing early morning physical
jerks. Women began to roll themselves with rubber rollers that
had little studs all over them and were supposed to remove super
fluous flesh. Fruit was being boosted as a slimming agent by an Eat
More Fruit campaign: the Daily Chronicle in March 1927 recom
mended orange-juice with a dash of gin. The Sunday Times sug
gested that the slimming effect could be given by piping at the
hips of skirts. The Daily Mail printed numerous warnings by
prominent doctors of the dangers to health of reckless slimming.
But the cult continued in full vigour until at least 1932.
Several other novelties made their appearance in these years,
such as fireproof glass dishes and casseroles for cooking. Potato
crisps were a popular new food. These had originally been imported
from France, but were now made in England and over a million
packets were sold in 1928. People found them invaluable for im
promptu parties and rush-meals. For a short time there were Photo-
matons in all the big stores: at a cost of one shilling they produced
in a few minutes a strip of developed photographs of a sitter taken
from various angles. Rubber soles and heels for shoes had been in
popular use for years, but had been considered ungendemanly
like celluloid collars. They could now be worn by the best people ,
as being more water-tight, longer-lasting, and quieter to walk on
than leather. Luggage was getting lighter and lighter: suitcases and
SPORT AND CONTROVERSY 221
hatboxes being made of fibre and other light composite materials
salesmen delighted in jumping hard on the suitcases to show pros
pective customers how strong they were.
Almost all sports but archery, bowls, and croquet gained in
popularity during this period, the greatest advances being in swim
ming and Association football. Before the war, practically no
lower-middle or working-class people, except in sea-coast towns,
could swim; now covered and open-air swimming baths, to which
elementary school-children were taken, and cheap excursions by
road and rail to the sea made the non-swimmer feel behind the
rimes. Football had been brought by ex-Servicemen into country
districts where it was unknown: a network of amateur football
leagues spread all over Great Britain, and the Saturday afternoon
matches were the chief event of the week in most villages: these
were the junior leagues , the senior league teams being provided by
towns not rich enough to pay for professionals. Teams from banks,
factories, and public utility companies competed in another exten
sive league network.
Between the Football Association, which controlled profes
sional football, and the Amateur Football Association, which had
broken away from it many years before the war, there was a polite
truce. The well-to-do-classes had a strong prejudice against profes
sional Association football as mercenary, venal and unsporting, and
the Select Press published only the briefest reports of even First
Division League matches with gates of hundreds of thousands. This
was old-fashioned, for F.A. football was now at least as clean as
the amateur variety the crowds execrated any dirty play, the
integrity of referees was beyond suspicion, and hard training had
raised the level of professional skill to a point where even the best
amateur team could not seriously compete. Every year the Corin
thians, a club drawn from public-school footballers, entered for
the Football Cup; but their kick and rush tactics and shoulder-
charges, though disconcerting, never succeeded against the close
passing and well-drilled manoeuvres of the professional teams which
they met. The amateur s chief scorn was for the end of season sale
of players.
Rugby was the most honoured football game at the universities
and among the upper-middle classes: it had escaped the taint of
professionalism everywhere except in parts of the north of Eng-
222 SPORT AND CONTROVERSY
land. The depressed and revolutionary South Wales, oddly enough,
preferred this rougher but gentlemanly game to Association, and
played it in a perfect amateur spirit, though generous expense
allowances semi-professionalized a few clubs.
Lawn tennis also became enormously popular, not only among
the well-to-do, who had been prejudiced against it as a less manly
game than cricket, but among the middle classes, who had not
hitherto had any facilities for playing. Its social advantages were
obvious. Now that women had added thirty points to their game
by rationalizing their dress and adopting the overarm service,
mixed doubles were no longer a nuisance to be gallantly borne
with, but a real pleasure. And in half an hour s tennis one could get
quicker and better exercise than in three hours of club cricket.
Wimbledon tennis tournaments were attended by thousands in
stead of hundreds, new clubs sprang up everywhere, local author-
rities provided public courts in parks, and the Daily Express offered
a trophy for a knock-out competition between representatives of
London suburban clubs.
Most popular of indoor games was auction bridge: by 1929 it
had completely ousted billiards from most large houses. Bridge was
an upper-class and upper-middle-class game. The lower-middle
class continued to play the less skilful whist from which auction
had developed in 1902 by way of Russian whist or dummy bridge
long after it had died out in the London clubs. Whist-drives for
charity were a regular form of amusement in church and chapel
circles throughout the period. In 1929 Auction began to be suc
ceeded by the American variety of Contract . Card games were
becoming less and less a form of gambling. Although people played
for small stakes to steady their game , their chief interest was now
the game itself; the succession of improvements on the original
whist having always had the same tendency to make a good player
increasingly superior to chance, by enabling him to limit the
damage of bad hands. The Observer in November 1929 noted:
Contract has been boomed in a way that Auction never was. That
was the year that Ely Culbertson and his wife, the American Con
tract experts, brought over a team which defeated two crack Brit
ish ones. The publicity given to these matches was so great that
international contests were played between Britain, Austria, Ger
many, and Holland. In 1933 twenty-seven thousand people at-
SPORT AND CONTROVERSY 223
tended a match at Selfridge s lasting for several days, between an
American and a British team for the International Schwab Trophy.
In that year over three hundred bridge clubs in London alone
were affiliated to the newly formed British Bridge League. A good
deal of poker was also played in the part of Society that had gone
American, and among business men in the advertising trade and
on the Stock Exchange: but it never reached the suburbs, as Con
tract did.
Two new spectacular sports were successfully tried in the later
Twenties, both with the advantage over horse racing and football
that they could be played under cover and by artificial light: these
were dirt-track racing for motor-bicycles, an American novelty,
and greyhound racing with the help of a mechanical hare. Dirt-
track racing was very popular among the hero-worshipping
younger men and women; but it did not take on so remarkably as
dog racing, because it did not give so speculative a betting market.
Greyhound and whippet coursing for live hares had long been a
popular sport, particularly in mining districts, and the Waterloo
Cup, an annual event, was patronized by the highest sporting
society. The necessary elements for the new form of greyhound
racing were therefore already to hand when in 1925 rumours of the
electric hare first went round; but experts were almost unanimous
in their view that dogs would never be so foolish as to chase a
dummy hare more than once. Nevertheless the newly formed
Greyhound Racing Association equipped the Belle Vue track at
Manchester, and the first race-meeting was held on the 24th July
1926, under the shadow of the General Strike. Three thousand
people came and the dogs proved as gullible as the promoters had
hoped. Although Lancashire had been badly hit by the strike, and
people had little money to spend, attendance slowly increased, and
by the end of the season ten thousand was a small gate. The re
opening night in spring 1927 attracted a crowd of twenty-five
thousand. More tracks were opened at Edinburgh, at the White
City, at the Wembley Stadium, and finally all over the country. In
1927 sixty-two greyhound-racing companies were registered in
different parts of Britain, with a total capital of 7,000,000. Grey
hound racing supplied many of the thrills of horse racing, and was
much cheaper both for the owners and the public. Dogs achieved
celebrity far surpassing that of Waterloo Cup winners: the names
224 SPORT AND CONTROVERSY
of Charlie Cranston, the 1927 Champion of England, and his suc
cessor Mick the Miller (stuffed and preserved for posterity) were
as honoured as those of Felix the Cat, the Agha Khan s famous race
horse Mumtaz Mahal, and even Tishy, the comic horse who twisted
its legs, immortalized by Tom Webster, the Daily Mail sporting
cartoonist.
In 1929 filmgoers were bowled over by the talking pictures.
The Singing FooF, with Al Jolson, at the newly opened Regal
Cinema at Marble Arch prompted a competitor in the Evening
Standard Film Criticism Contest to write: C I have just seen my first
talking picture "The Singing Fool" and was impressed with the
tremendous possibilities of this new form of entertainment. It is
uncanny the way almost a soul is breathed into the characters por
trayed. After this, silent films, except Chaplin s, fell into disrepute
and soon all but the unpretentious provincial picture-houses had to
close down for two or three months while they were being wired
for Sound . But Hollywood found great drawbacks to its new suc
cess: very few of its silent stars, though admirable as mimes and
mannequins, had any training in elocution. Most of them had to
be discarded- London and New York were raided for effective sub
stitutes, at great cost. The same Evening Standard competitor con
fessed that he had felt c a bitter disillusionment to hear the half-
mumbled elocution of the otherwise beautiful women in The Sing
ing Fool . And though the American accent in comedy was charm
ing, it spoilt the theatrical illusion for British filmgoers to hear
Mary Queen of Scots or Richard Coeur de Lion, in a historical
drama, speaking with a Southern drawl, a Yankee twang, or the
incisive accent of the Middle West.
The Evening Standard films editor commented on the critical
acuity of modern filmgoers: c . . . True, they are indulgent to
weaknesses in a film; but they notice them all the same. They never
fail to respond to the "high spots" of greatness. And they forgive
much that is poor for a flash or two of genius. Here are no "hicks"
or "rubes", but an educated, cultured, responsive, sensitive people,
eager to hail the work of the masters of the studios. The masters
of the studios had little to offer in the way of smash-hits after Al
Jolson had sonny-boyed the Talkies into fame: they decided to
forgo the obvious advantages of the cinema in showing action
beyond the technical resources of the theatre, and used their newly
SPORT AND CONTROVERSY 225
recruited players to transfer stage successes to the screen with little
change of technique.
Paul Rotha, a professional cinema-critic, was one of the many
who regretted what had happened. In his The Film of To-day,
published in 1931, he sighed for the old silent days, when films
were not bolstered up with variety turns and orchestral interludes,
as well as by the erection of vast palaces of luxury and atrocious
vulgarity. . . . Since talking films have occupied the attention of
studios, the pictorial value of the screen has greatly deteriorated.
The films of the last year of the silent period were far more pleas
ing from a pictorial point of view. The public has tired of its craze
for simply hearing speech and seeing moving pictures of the
speakers. Audiences in 1930 failed to maintain the big business
created by the talking boom of 1929. Attendances dropped to pre-
dialogue level. The season of 1930-1 showed that box-office receipts
had fallen 30 per cent in comparison with a year ago. British film
companies took advantage of the confusion to try documentary
films without much story interest: John Grierson s Drifters was
the first short film of this kind made in England. The most famous
was Man of Aran by Robert O Flaherty, which documented
primitive life in the Irish islands off Galway. The sequence show
ing how Tiger King, a stalwart islander, killed a basking shark
was regarded as the chief screen event of 1933.
The coming of the Talkies hit another class of cinema worker
as hard as it did the dumb silent star: the cinema musician. The
picture-houses, at the same time as they wired for Sound 5 , dis
missed their orchestras and replaced them with cinema organists
and their Wurlitzers. These orchestras had played unceasingly
throughout sessions in order to drown the click of the projector,
to breach the gap between reels, and to make it seem reasonable
that one could not hear what the actors were saying. They had
played chiefly Classical music bits of the Tannhauser Overture ,
of Schubert s Unfinished Symphony , of Gounod s Faust and
Verdi s A ida and Chopin s Nocturnes , but letting one melody
flow into another as the mood of the picture seemed to require. All
this ended as suddenly as sub-titles; for the Talkies provided their
own musical setting, hashed up by Hollywood musicians.
The provision of popular musical classics was left to the B.B.G
By this time wireless reception had so greatly improved that, except
226 SPORT AND CONTROVERSY
on occasions of really bad atmospherics, to switch on the wireless
at home was almost as good as attending the Queen s Hall, and far
cheaper and more comfortable. The B.B.C. now provided dance
music: plenty of the humorous and sentimental kind Jack Payne
and Henry Hall, for instance very occasionally the really hot
stuff, straight from America. It gave light, tuneful tea-time music,
and loud, stirring brass-band music; ballad concerts; and German
lieder concerts. There were also such series as the Toundations of
Music , which introduced the public to little-known, early works.
By taking over the Promenade Concerts, the B.B.C. was able not
only to produce the traditionally classical symphonies but also to
help in the Mozart and Haydn revival, and sponsor contemporary
music. Music had been making developments analogous to those in
modernistic art and writing: the octave was varied with quarter
tones and eighth tones; twelve-tone scales were used and rhythms
no longer based on the constant time-value of the musical bar;
sound combinations that had hitherto been disallowed as discords
were exploited. The B.B.C. always kept decorously in arrear of the
very latest experiments, but shortened the time-lag between the
composer and the general public most remarkably: it put on the air
a great deal of Stravinsky, Hindemith, Schonberg, Sibelius, Bartok,
of the Parisian experimentalists, Les Six , and such British com
posers as Sir Arnold Bax, Frederick Delius, Constant Lambert and
William Walton, who otherwise would have had to wait years
rather than months for a hearing. One advantage of the air was
that usually meal-time and evening hours could be allocated to the
low-brow or general public, the mornings to housewives, and mid-
afternoon and late-night hours to the leisured.
People were no longer much interested in the technical progress
of radio as it was now beginning to be called. Instead they were
acquiring a radio sense to match their cinema sense and were
becoming highly critical of programmes. There was not enough
jazz; there was too much jazz; the drama was too exciting; the talks
were too dull; there was not enough light comedy; there was too
much symphonic music. Everyone who wrote in had his own
opinion about what programmes the public wanted. All seemed to
agree, however, that the programmes were not sufficiently varied.
In 1926 the B.B.C. responded to the demand for brighter pro
grammes with a lively experiment conducted by Ronald Knox
SPORT AND CONTROVERSY 227
(brother of E. V. Knox, the Punch poet), who from being a witty
critic of the Roman Church, had become Father Ronald Knox, a
witty Catholic missionary. He broadcast a talk which took the
form of a circumstantial account of a revolution in England. This
was treading on delicate ground, for it was the year of the General
Strike. The Daily Express protested strongly, under the headlines:
A Blunder by B.B.C. Revolution Hoax by Wireless. People
Alarmed all Week-End. A clear warning had been given before the
talk that the incidents described were imaginary, yet people took
seriously Father Knox s account of the blowing up of the Houses
of Parliament and of butchery in St. James s Park. Sir Leo Chiozza
Money, the financial journalist, said: The item was utterly
humourless, and the Lord Mayor of Newcastle complained indig
nantly that his wife had been seriously upset, and that he had had
to telephone to a neighbouring mayor for reassurance. The B.B.C.
defended itself by pointing out that, since people complained that
the dramas were too exciting and the talks too dull and the pro
grammes not sufficiently varied, it had done what it could to oblige;
and claimed to have received many more letters in appreciation of
this talk than of protest.
The newspapers kept up a running fire of criticism against the
B.B.C., the chief marksman being Collie Knox, the Daily Mail wire
less editor. The voices of announcers were a permanent offence:
they were too refaned and it was considered preposterous to stab
ilize what was called The Oxford Accent as the representative
intonation of the whole vigorous people. In 1928 the trouble was
censorship. L. J. Maxse, editor of the National Review, and Hand-
ley Page, of aeroplane fame, were to take part in a debate on Is
Flying a Fraud? which had been arranged for the benefit of King
Edward s Hospital Fund. Their scripts were censored, however,
because they not only attacked the Air Ministry but made propa
ganda on behalf of British flying. They indignantly pointed out
that the B.B.C. had just allowed Emil Ludwig, the popular bi
ographer, to make German propaganda in a talk on Bismarck. The
controversy grew more bitter when Bernard Shaw was refused
permission to broadcast on his seventieth birthday, because he
would not guarantee not to be provocative. But any stick was good
enough to beat the B.B.C. with and keep it from getting too power
ful or self-important. When it refused to produce Reginald Berke-
228 SPORT AND CONTROVERSY
ley s play, Machines, on the grounds of its being without interest ,
the Press most inconsistently accused it of banning the play, which
dealt realistically with divorce and murder, for fear of stirring
up a controversy like the one over Father Knox! There was more
trouble in 1928 when the B.B.C., which had become a public cor
poration in 1927, proposed to bring out a literary weekly, the
Listener, which was to reprint broadcast talks, give book-reviews,
and publish some original articles. The newspapers strongly at
tacked this undesirable incursion by the Corporation. They asked
indignantly whether it was also proposed to publish a B.B.C. Times
and a B.B.C. Daily Mail. The Listener, however, came into exist
ence on the understanding that no more than 10 per cent of its
material should be original: the rest would be reprints of broadcast
talks. The Listener, though it had to remember its low-brow public,
contrived to give more space and fairer reviews to advanced artistic
and literary work than its most intellectually ambitious rivals. Its
illustrations were the best to be found in any British popular maga
zine; and it published not only news-photographs but photographs
of works in art galleries and museums.
The theatres also took part in these attacks against the B.B.C.
When in October 1929 James Agate gave a series of broadcast talks
on the drama for the B.B.C, several theatres sent him the usual
critic s invitation card, with the curious conditions: The invitation
is intended to meet the convenience of legitimate journalism, ex
clusive of broadcasting. For theatre managers were beginning to
regard the B.B.C. as a rival.
Controversy was the keyword of these years; and on the stage
the controversial play of ideas was coming back into favour.
Shaw s The Apple Cart was produced in 1929, and hailed as a
wonderful achievement for a man of seventy-three . It was a poli
tical extravaganza, making up in provocative thought for what it
lacked in dramatic unity. It showed Shaw s transition from ortho
dox Socialism to his personal brand of Leftism. He wrote of the
play: The conflict is not really between royalty and democracy.
It is between both and plutocracy, which, having destroyed the
royal power by frank force under democratic pretexts, has bought
and swallowed democracy. Money talks; money prints; money
broadcasts; money reigns; and kings and labour leaders alike have
to register its decrees, and even, by a staggering paradox, to finance
SPORT AND CONTROVERSY 229
its enterprise and guarantee its profits. . . . From the moment
when the Socialists attain to what is with unintentional irony called
"power" (meaning the drudgery of carrying on for the plutocrats)
they no longer dare even to talk of nationalizing any industry,
however socially vital, that has a farthing of profit for plutocracy
still left in it, and that can be made to yield a farthing for it by
subsidies.
Shaw was never an original thinker, but always daringly antici
pated what intelligent people were on the point of all saying
together. Nearly the whole of the Leftism of the Thirties is con
tained in The Apple Cart .
The Press knew that sex was a subject that its public was in
creasingly interested in, yet knew also that straight pornography
did not pay in a family newspaper. It solved the question by a
Clean-the-Stage campaign, attacks on obscene books which the
public would not otherwise have heard of, and attacks on the police
for their handling of sexual offences. It featured the London Public
Morality Council, not as Mrs. Grundy spoil-sports, which would
have been the attitude six or seven years before, but as crusaders
for purity.
The Bishop of London was a prominent clean-the-stager. He
presided at one meeting in Caxton Hall where objections were
made to Scotch Mist , a play by Sir Patrick Hastings, K.C., who
had been Attorney-General in the Labour Government. One
speaker remarked: Tor instance, in "Scotch Mist" a character tells
his wife, "You are bad, aren t you?" The answer is, "I hope I am."
That is merely nonsense. But then there are plays that take the
name of God in vain. We claim that we have the right to ask the
Censor to stop this. Large numbers of Londoners, it was said,
earned their living by various forms of vice, and plays such as this
played into their hands. However, Sir William Joynson-Hicks,
the Home Secretary, refused the recommendations of the London
Public Morality Council, which had sponsored the Caxton Hall
meeting. He declared that the Censor was doing his work properly,
and suggested that the Council should turn its attention to obscene
books.
The most controversial play of 1928 was a sex-play in a school
setting, c Young Woodley by John Van Druten. Young Woodley
succeeded in passing the Censorship only after the Lord Chamber-
230 SPORT AND CONTROVERSY
lain himself had seen it at a private production by the Arts theatre
and decided that it was artistic rather than pornographic like the
gauze-draped "Living Statuary that was the nearest that revues
dared go to complete stage-nudity. The Daily Telegraph said of it
in 1929: Woodley continues to be, as he always was, perhaps the
most exquisite study in existence of a boy s awakening to love; the
young Romeo of our own times, with Mallowhurst for his Verona.
"Adolescent" is a word that usually has rather sinister associations.
Mr. van Druten clears away the ugly spots from the word; he
causes us to hear, instead, the first rustling of leaves in a still forest.
The shot-silk texture of the boy s innocence of life and his know
ledge of life during his last term at school are subtly blended.
Controversy over obscene books did not rise until the appear
ance in 1928 of The Well of Loneliness, the mannish Radclyffe
Hall s emotional protest against the world s cruel misunderstanding
of Lesbian love. Indignation was stirred up against it by James
Douglas. He declared in the Sunday Express: 1 would rather give
a healthy boy or girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel. As a
result of this and other protests, the book was banned. Like Norah
James s banned Sleeveless Errand and James Joyce s Ulysses, it
went into several editions in Paris. In the serious Press the banning
of books was debated at length. Correspondents wrote to ask
whether Customs officers had a secret index of banned books, and
added that, if so, this was disgraceful in a free country. One letter
to the New Statesman came from a member of the Reform Club,
who had written to the Contact Editions Press, Paris, to ask the
prices of two books, after having read excellent reviews of them
in the Criterion and Outlook. For two months he got no reply;
then he received back his original letter, together with a statement
from Sir Archibald Bodkin himself (the Director of Public Prosecu
tions) to the effect that all letters to Contact Editions were auto
matically searched, that the books, whose prices he had in all
innocence inquired, were grossly obscene , and that he had made
himself liable to prosecution under Section 63 of the Post Office
Act, 1908. The writer protested against this unnotified confiscation
of his mail and questioned his contravention of the Section of the
Act mentioned, with which he was professionally familiar. The
incident closed with his being again threatened with penalties under
the Act which provided for a maximum punishment of one year s
SPORT AND CONTROVERSY 231
imprisonment with hard labour and told that the matter was duly
recorded in the Department. This letter brought forth many com
plaints of the difficulty of obtaining James Joyce s Ulysses. It also
brought the member of the Reform Club sixty-four offers of safe
ways and means of obtaining the books he wanted.
The police were in trouble that same year over the Savidge Case.
Miss Savidge was charged by the police with indecency in Hyde
Park; her partner in the alleged indecency was a distinguished old
knight who had assisted the Labour Government in 1924 as Chair
man of the Committee on Withheld Pay for Naval Officers. The
case was dismissed by the magistrate who heard it. But then Sir
Archibald Bodkin authorized two police officers to make inquiries
in order to rebut any charges of perjury against the police wit
nesses in the case. Miss Savidge was fetched from the business
where she worked, and interrogated for a long time at Scotland
Yard. Questions were asked in the House of Commons about the
legality of such arbitrary interrogations, and the Home Secretary
had to appoint a tribunal to inquire into the matter. The tribunal
recommended that interrogations should only take place after pre
liminary information had been lodged, and under conditions that
protected the persons interrogated. This led to a parliamentary
debate on the need for discretion on the part of the police.
Lord Birkenhead defended the police. He said about the Savidge
Case: It is not my habit to frequent the park at disputable hours.
... If there took place some caress, of a kind that was distin
guished by the young lady herself in the evidence as being a kiss
but not a kiss of passion, have they very great grounds for com
plaint if a policeman forty or fifty yards away misinterpreted the
precise nature of the caress? . . . You must really range yourself
definitely either on the side of the constitutional authority or
amongst those who are willing, perhaps for quite inadequate rea
sons, not to do so.
This view was attacked as militaristic and it was thought sig
nificant that the Commissioner of Metropolitan Police was Viscount
Byng of Vimy, a famous general. Lord Balfour of Burleigh com
plained that c what the country wants in its police is that they should
be the guardians of law and order, and not, as there is a tendency
now for them to have to try to be, censors of public morals .
Controversy was continued in letters to the Press, especially
232 SPORT AND CONTROVERSY
to the weekly Press. The following letter was published in the New
Statesman: Did you know that it was a criminal offence to ask a
girl to go for a walk? I didn t. An old gentleman did it last week
in Hyde Park and the girl, instead of saying "No, thank you," like
a little lady, called a policeman. The magistrate called the old
gentleman a disgusting scoundrel, fined him several pounds, and
told him he was sorry he could not send him to prison; but the girl
he publicly congratulated on her courage for daring to be a house
maid and daring to call a policeman. Personally, I should have
thought the old gentleman deserved a gold watch for his courage
in daring to go into Hyde Park at all after recent events. But any
how, did you know that it was a criminal offence to ask a girl to
go for a walk? Perhaps because the gentleman was an old gentle
man? If so, at what age does it become a crime to ask a girl to go
for a walk? . . .*
These questions were never officially answered, and still from
time to time police activities in Hyde Park made front-page news.
The Savidge Case was followed by the Royal Oak incident.
Rear-Admiral Collard had a disagreement with two of his junior
officers, Captain Dewar and Commander Daniel, as to which side
of the battleship Royal Oak he should disembark from. When he
came aboard the next day he insulted officers at the salute by walk
ing straight past them. This irregularity was succeeded by another.
One evening the band was playing on the quarter-deck, and danc
ing was in progress, when Rear-Admiral Collard suddenly sum
moned the bandmaster, Percy Barnacle, to speak to him. The Rear-
Admiral was alleged to have said, Come here, you b . Do you
call yourself a flagship bandmaster? I ll have you sent home. I ve
never heard such a bloody noise in all my life. It s like a dirge. No
one could dance to it. Can t you play dance-music? In any case I
will report you. Go and see if you can t do better! Barnacle com
plained that these words were discouraging to band-work and
detrimental to band-discipline. On the next day the Chaplain told
the Admiral that he should not refer to people as b s in front
of guests. Dewar and Daniel were soon court-martialled at Gibraltar
for reading publicly in the wardroom remarks calculated to bring
him into contempt, and which were subversive to naval discipline.
They were found guilty. The Admiralty, however, reviewed the
sentences and decided to place the Admiral on the retired list. The
SPORT AND CONTROVERSY 233
other two officers were not to be precluded from further employ
ment when vacancies occur . Captain Dewar was given another
ship, but Commander Daniel preferred to join the staff of the Daily
Mail.
This incident led to jocularly indiscreet newspaper debate as
to what name the Admiral had called the Bandmaster. A writer to
the New Statesman observed that if it is the word which (I am
sure) we all have in mind, it is fair to the Admiral and to the Band
master to recall that in Johnson s Dictionary the secondary mean
ing of that word is: "a term of endearment among sailors. . ."
Another writer pointed out that the word was not the one which
we have all in mind, but one which will be found applied by
Shakespeare to Philip Faulconbridge in King John. Even this, pro
nounced with a short "a", might not have hurt the bandmaster s
sensibility. But, pronounced with a long "a", it is apparently, even
"among sailors", a deadly insult.
A first-class newspaper story was the visit to London in March
1928 of King Amanullah of Afghanistan and his Queen. Preliminary
reports described the Queen as being as chic as a Parisienne, and
told how proud the King was of his European culture: much to the
disgust of his Moslem followers, he was even wearing a top hat. In
London the Afghan monarchs stayed at Claridge s Hotel, where,
so the Daily News reported, British Empire elegance, with no at
tempt at pseudo-oriental splendours, is the keynote of the three
suites. Amanullah himself provided all the necessary Eastern
colour. On his arrival he wore a long cloak of sage-green, a tunic
of azure slashed with gold and decorated with jewelled brocade
and glittering medals, trousers of geranium-scarlet. His black and
red helmet was crowned with a white cockade. He attended ban
quets, where he drank toasts in lemonade; rode in a tank on Salis
bury Plain; went to see The Desert Song , toured the B.S.A. works
and there tried out a machine-gun, his eyes sparkling when he hit
the mark. The newspapers rose to the occasion by going Eastern .
A member of Amanullah s suite was reported by the Daily News to
have said: Look you, your English maidens are divinely beautiful.
They are as fair as the pale moon which shines so gloriously in
your western sky; their eyes are as bright as the eastern stars; and
their complexion is just like the exquisite rose of Afghanistan.
When, on his return to Afghanistan, Amanullah lost his throne to
234 SPORT AND CONTROVERSY
an old-fashioned bandit, this was another good story. The Press
generously attributed his fall rather to the backwardness of his
people in accepting Western reforms, than to his own incom
petence in putting them across.
Still another story blew up out of this. T. E. Lawrence, or
338171 Aircraftman Shaw , had got himself transferred to India to
avoid the publicity of Revolt in the Desert, the shortened version
of Seven Pillars of Wisdom. He was sent to the North- West
Frontier. His literary agent sold the film rights of the story to an
American company, the publicity agents of which planted on the
American Press a nonsensical story of Lawrence, the Secret Service
Master-Mind, organising anti-Red spying from his headquarters at
Benares, in impenetrable Indian disguise. This story was taken up
by the British Press too, and Ernest Thurtle, a Labour member,
asked a series of questions in the House about it. The suggestion
was that Lawrence had stirred up the revolt against Amanullah,
who had become too friendly with the Russians for British con
venience. This baseless story became so embarrassing that, at the
request of the British Minister at Kabul, Lawrence was recalled to
England. Thereafter in mass trials in Russia notably at the Donetz
Valley sabotage trial the spies who pleaded guilty often confessed
to having had illicit commerce with Colonel Lawrence, the Super
Spy, as well as with that other bogey-man of the Communists, Sir
Henry Deterding, the Anglo-Dutch oil magnate.
V
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The Depression, 1930
In the spring of 1929 the second Labour Government came quiedy
into office, as a natural election swing-over in two-party govern
ment. It held 289 seats, against the Conservatives 260; however,
the Liberals held the scales balanced with their 58. That women
workers above the age of twenty-one were allowed to vote, tinder
the Act of 1928, aroused little comment during the election; though
the Flapper Vote outcry in the Daily Mail in the spring of that year
had been extremely violent. The Labour ministers were no longei;
accused of being almost Bolshevists: indeed, the Bolshevists them
selves had become respectable. Punch, in February 1929, published
a cartoon which showed John Bull saying: This impossible Bol-
shie/ and the Bolshie: This impossible bourgeois/ and then both:
Well, my friend, what about business?
At first the Labour Government was popular. Philip Snowden,
the Chancellor of the Exchequer, took a firm stand over the prob
lem of French war debts to Britain, which made him a national
hero. British upper-class resentment against the get-rich-quick
habits of French hotel-keepers and the service, monsieur, service,
monsieur* of attendants at French theatres had been growing for
some years. The beaten French fulminated against Snowden s ter
rible accountancy ; and the Select Press doubted whether the mere
million or two of pounds sterling in question were worth the loss
of good feeling between the two countries. Another popular act of
the Labour Government was the withdrawal of the last British
troops from the Rhine, authorized by Arthur Henderson, the For
eign Secretary. The international outlook at the time was hopeful;
Briand had produced a plan for the United States of Europe, which,
though opposed by isolationists in England, was generally wel
comed as a promise of peaceful times to come. J. H. Thomas toured
235
236 THE DEPRESSION, 1930
Canada to show Labour s concern for the Empire. Ramsay Mac-
Donald visited the United States, drove through showers of ticker-
tape at New York, and was saluted with sirens from all the ships in
the harbour. He and President Hoover sat together on a log over
a creek on the President s estate, discussing the weather, fishing,
and the prospects of a continued world peace.
At the end of October came the sudden end of the Hoover
prosperity boom in the United States, when the whole of Wall
Street stock-market, not merely a section of it, collapsed. The
American public, encouraged by the Republican slogan a car in
every garage and a chicken in every pot , had been interesting
itself in the stock-market and plunging with enthusiastic ignorance.
Financiers took advantage of this bullish tendency to drive up the
nominal value of stocks to the highest figure possible, in order to
unload on the amateur speculators to the very best advantage. They
were too successful. When they baled out and allowed the market
to find its own level, it crashed disastrously. Hundreds of thousands
of Americans lost all their spare cash and then rushed to the banks
to be sure at least of their capital: the rush broke the smaller banks
by the hundred, and they dragged down many of the larger banks;
though no real loss of wealth had taken place, millions of people
were ruined and thrown out of employment.
Great Britain at first was not much affected, and it was hoped,
for the sake of world trade, that the American market would re
cover its stability. But it gradually became clear that the financiers
had buried themselves in the ruins of the market and that in Amer
ica the Careless Twenties must give way to what Groucho Marx
the comedian afterwards called the Threadbare Thirties. The Stock
Exchange became very gloomy; but the general public had never
played at speculation except in betting on sport. Great Britain was
also far slower than the United States to catch fire in either panic
or enthusiasm, and the British financial system had been protected
against local panics by the federation of nearly all small banks into
the Big Five, and the close co-operation between these. In Britain
the Thirties were to be merely the Troubled Thirties . Repercus
sions from Wall Street broke few windows in the City.
Nevertheless, there was a sharp rise in unemployment, due to
the decrease in American orders and the general disorganization of
world markets; and now emigration to Australia a stock remedy
THE DEPRESSION, 1930 237
in crises of this sort was suspended by the Australian Parliament
until the industrial slump should have ended. J. H. Thomas, who as
Lord Privy Seal in 1929-30 was charged with the task of dealing
with unemployment, brought forward road and railway develop
ment schemes. These were criticized as inadequate, and he pleaded
for more time; which people at first were ready to grant him, for
the matter did not seem so urgent. The Careless Twenties ended
on no note of alarm or despondency.
John Buchan, the Scottish novelist, historian, publisher, poli
tician, who became Moderator of the Church of Scotland and later,
as Lord Tweedsmuir, Governor-General of Canada, summed up
the decade in an article for the Morning Post on the last day of
December 1929. His view is interesting as embodying the sanest
Conservative opinion of the time. He held that there had been a
widespread decline of parliamentary institutions, but the old self-
conscious nationalism was discredited, and so was the sentimental
internationalism of 1919. Dogmas were being broken down social,
philosophical, scientific, and literary, as well as political. Marxian
Socialism, proved barren by the practice of Russia, had fewer
adherents than ever. But for the bold experiment of Fascism the
decade has not been fruitful in constructive statesmanship/ Only
in Italy had new men with new ideas arisen. Nevertheless, owing
to the patient work of the ordinary man, civilization has been
saved, and, on the whole, the nations are once more a stable society .
The Fascist revolution had been given a mixed reception in
Britain: the Radical and Labour Press had furiously assailed it for
the gangster methods of the Blackshirt partymen against Socialists
and Radicals c the rule of the rubber truncheon and the castor-oil
bottle growing especially hot about the murder of Matteoti. But
the Conservative Press saw Mussolini as an energetic saviour of
Italy from Red revolution, loyal to his Monarchy; and travellers
came back from Rome and Florence with enthusiastic praises for
the new Italian spirit, which, at last, had succeeded in making rail
way trains run on time. That Fascism could possibly grow into a
menace to the British Empire was considered fantastic: because of
the inglorious military history of Italy ever since she became a
nation. Fascism in Britain had not yet appeared as such, but Fascist
behaviour was already manifesting itself. Fascism in Italy, as Na-
238 THE DEPRESSION, 1930
tional Socialism in Germany, was opposed to Communism in being
nationalistic rather than internationalistic in character, anti-Trust
rather than anti-Capitalistic, and supported by the dissident lower-
middle class rather than the proletarian working class.
When the news had originally reached Britain of the Fascist
march on Rome (i8th October 1922) the Spectator, which repre
sented moderate Conservative opinion, noted editorially: There
were not many conflicts and the revolution was carried through
almost without bloodshed. The King sent for Signor Mussolini, the
Leader of the Fascists. . . . We must add one picturesque touch
very characteristic of an Italian revolution. The new Ministers
asked their chief as to the clothes they should wear when kissing
hands. "Top hats and black coats," was the laconic order of the
Prime Minister, though he had to send out one of his colleagues in
a hurry to buy him the necessary top hat. Apparently the silken
cylinder is to be the symbol of the new Government s policy. Wit
ness Signor Mussolini s excellent tqjjgram to Mr. Bonar Law and
M. Poincare. We accept the omen. Mussolini s telegram to Bonar
Law had run: I am confident that in accomplishing the duties com
mitted to me I shall be able to safeguard the supreme interests of
the country, which are in accordance with the interests of peace
and civilization, and that the solidarity of the Allied nations which
I regard as indispensable for the effectiveness of their political
action will be assured. (The Daily Mail carried no leader on Italian
events: it was too busy assailing Bolshevist Arthur Henderson and
his associates: Labour threatens every maris borne and -furniture,
and every woman s clothes and jewellery, as was done in Russia.
. . . [Daily Mail italics] . Until now a cardinal principle of progres
sive politics in liberty-loving Britain has been "No Taxation With
out Representation". The slogan which the Labour executive have
emblazoned upon their red banner is "Representation Without
Taxation"?}
In the summer of 1924 the Spectator further reported in an
article The Nemesis of Communism : Less than two years ago the
Fascists combined together in order to help to make the law prevail
over anarchy. They have ended by overriding all law and asserting
that they are the State. The Fascists are ultra-patriots, but what
sort of attitude they will adopt towards other nations we do not
THE DEPRESSION, 1930 239
know. We do not like their fury, but we cannot believe that they
really have light enough hearts to upset the Peace, to try to filch
away Italians from Switzerland, to reopen the Jugo-Slav question,
to close the Adriatic Sea, to try to seize Malta and to win for Italy
the hegemony of the Mediterranean. The reports which attribute
such intentions to the Fascists are probably mad rumours.
The Daily Mail subsequently gave its blessing to Fascism, and to
National Socialism as soon as it carne into power. Newspaper cir
culations tended to zoning according to the intelligence of sub
scribers. The Daily Mail could claim a higher coverage of the upper
income group than the Daily Express, but the more progressive and
independent-minded readers of both upper-middle and lower-
middle classes were in the Beaverbrook zone Fascism with its in
sistence on mass-thinking did not appeal to them.
The most spectacular British example of Fascist behaviour in the /
early Thirties, though it passed at the time for Red Socialism, was
the seizure of the Mace on the i8th July 1930. That evening in the
House of Commons the members were voting on an unimportant^
Bill, and when the tellers returned from the lobby they lined up to
advance to the table. Among them was a Labour member, John
Beckett, who was not long afterwards to help Sir Oswald Mosley r
to found the British Union of Fascists. Suddenly, according to
The Times report, he struck a truculent attitude, failed to bow to
the Speaker as was customary, and exclaimed: *I don t know what
you think, Mr. Speaker, but it s a damned disgrace. He was refer
ring to the Home Secretary s refusal to interfere with a sentence
passed by a bench of magistrates, which condemned an eight-year-
old boy to four strokes of the birch Beckett had just described
this as a monstrous outrage . He then seized the Mace from its*
bracket on the table and hurried with it to the doors. Nobody had
done such a thing since the days of Oliver Cromwell. When he
reached the bar of the House a crowd held him up, and attendants
recovered the Mace, which was calmly brought back to the table
by the Serjeant-at-Arms. Beckett, meanwhile, continued to lounge
about in the gangway, his hands in his pockets, shouting insults at^
the protesting members. The Speaker then asked for the division
to be withdrawn, and named Beckett for disorderly conduct By
this time Beckett had left the House. The Prime Minister moved
his suspension; which was carried by a division in which Beckett
24 THE DEPRESSION, 1930
received only six favourable votes. Later he apologized to the
House, and his suspension was revoked.
In 1930 the Conservative popular Press of London, conscious
of its increasing political power, especially in combination, put this
to a practical test. It would run by-election candidates independent
of the party organization. First, Lord Beaverbrook, as a Canadian,
complained in the Daily Express that in the 1929 election no one
had mentioned the Empire. In the Sunday Express he published the
challenge: Who is for Empire? The answer is all men and no one.
For while all men are willing to register the sentiment of goodwill
towards the Empire, the practical side of Imperial development has
been forgotten. He started an Empire Free Trade Crusade, which
was to weld the Empire into a closer economic unit, by putting a
tariff on all goods imported into Britain, with a special preference
for Imperial products. He declared that the movement would sup
port any party which took over its programme. The Daily Express
began to print a small crusader, in red, on the front page of every
issue. In leaders and cartoons it attacked Cobdenism and Free
Trade, characterizing them as out-of-date Victorian ideas. Mean
while, Lord Rothermere in the Daily Mail had also come out
strongly for taxing imported food a turn of events which the
Daily Express described as a bombshell . Lords Beaverbrook and
Rothermere then co-operated in founding a United Empire Party.
A quarter of a million of their readers subscribed 100,000 to party
funds. In a by-election at Twickenham, Sir John Ferguson, the
Conservative candidate, was persuaded to adopt the ticket of
Empire Free Trade; and though officially disowned by his party
was returned to Parliament. Another Empire Free Trader was
returned for West Fulham.
Baldwin and Beaverbrook were now negotiating, but could
agree on no common policy. Baldwin declared publicly that pro
tection for agriculture was impossible in urban England, and at a
Caxton Hall meeting attacked the Press Barons 5 attempts to dictate
Conservative policy, and accused them of queering the pitch . The
Empire movement was supported, however, by a Bankers Resolu
tion, published in July 1930. It stated: Great Britain must retain
her open market for all Empire Products, while being prepared to
impose duties on imports from all other countries. 5 This resolution
was said to have been signed by four of the Big Five Bank chairmen
THE DEPRESSION, 1930 241
and two of the Bank of England s directors; but no signatures were
made public and the resolution seems to have been entirely un
official.
The Beaverbrook-Rothermere collaboration was an uneasy one.
Rothermere s readers could be roused by such low-brow diehard
cries as "Break with Moscow , and No Surrender in India , which
did not suit Beaverbrook s public. Beaverbrook therefore withdrew
from the United Empire Party, and returned his part of the funds
to subscribers.
At the South Paddington by-election in October Beaverbrook
and Rothermere candidates ran against each other. There was also
an official Conservative candidate, Sir Herbert Liddiard, who at
first accepted Empire Free Trade, but rejected it again upon re
ceiving a reprimand from his Central Office. Lord Beaverbrook s
Empire Crusaders put up Vice-Admiral Taylor as candidate and
Lord Rothermere s United Empire Party appealed to the flapper
vote with Mrs. Stewart Richardson. A Labour candidate was also
in the field, but no Liberal. Lord Rothermere, disliking the look of
things, withdrew his support from Mrs. Stewart Richardson, and
explained why in a letter to her chairman: The reference in one of
my telegrams to the impossibility of Mrs. Stewart Richardson s
winning the seat was based on the very firm conviction which I
held that, in Conservative ranks, high titles are much more sought
after than in any other of the political parties, and that apart from
her own merits no woman candidate seeking to secure Conserva
tive votes would have any chance of success unless, like the Duchess
of Atholl or Viscountess Astor, she had a high tide. . . . This was
true enough; and the Daily Mail by spot-lighting the peerage at the
same time as it had deprecated the intrusion of women into politics
was very largely responsible.
But Mrs. Stewart Richardson, who spoke in favour of higher
wages, lower prices, fewer taxes, and more jobs for everyone, did
not retire; and her supporters declared that Lord Rothermere s
withdrawal had freed the United Empire Party of its greatest
burden. They accused the Press Barons of selling out to the new
Conservative group in Parliament, which was led by a former
Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Robert Home. Vice-Admiral -
Taylor was meanwhile electioneering with the help of many vans
and loudspeakers. He breezily described the Government as hav-
242 THE DEPRESSION, 1930
ing sentenced the Empire to be shot at dawn f or three years the
Empire had been treated as if it were populated by foreigners; and
had knocked in vain at the gates of the Motherland. Sir Herbert
Liddiard, the official Conservative, took an anti-Labour rather than
an anti-Beaverbrook line. "Just fancy South Paddington/ he said,
nice, decent, respectable district that we are represented by a
Labour member! He remarked of the Press Barons: They blame
Mr. Baldwin for being obstinate. By Heaven, he seems to me to
have been most accommodating. The Labour candidate concen
trated on attacking the Capitalist system, which in a meeting held
in a public baths he held responsible for the new rise in unemploy
ment. Most of all he blamed the Liberals: the Labour Government
depended on their vote in the House of Commons, but they stood
squarely in the way of social reform. Out of this extraordinary
confusion the Vice-Admiral emerged as victor by 941 votes; and
another Empire Crusader was elected for East Islington.
By now the effects of the Wall Street crash were being felt
severely. The Conservatives had accepted the need for Protection
and Imperial Preference, and Beaverbrook agreed to put up no
more candidates of his own. In December 1930 J. M. Keynes the
economist wrote: We have magneto trouble. How, then, can we
start up again? The Labour Government by itself seemed inca
pable of starting up again, and in the same month the Liberal
weekly, The Nation, declared that there is a sense of crisis in the
air, a sense of national emergency , and called for a National Gov
ernment. A feeler had already appeared in The Times a letter
from General Seely, a Liberal War Minister from 1912 to 1924
and later Lord Mottistone, to the effect that Britain is confronted
with a grave emergency , and it is equally clear that an election on
party lines will not help to meet it . He accused Labour of failing
to cure unemployment or grapple with abuses of the dole". Then
Baldwin, as leader of the Opposition, attacked Labour in the House
of Commons with: The enthusiasm is running out of your party
all over the country, because you have lost faith in Socialism.
Several Labour members cheered this statement and shouted: Come
over here, Stanley! J. H. Thomas admitted that he had no pro
gramme of reconstruction, and jokingly confessed that he was
breaking all records in the number of unemployed.
It was widely felt that mere coalition was not enough to coun-
THE DEPRESSION, 1930 243
teract the Depression. That same year a new party was formed by
two changeable, dissatisfied young men, Sir Oswald Mosley and
John Strachey, both originally Conservatives, and a few Labour
M.P.S. Its manifesto pledged itself to Action , the immediate action
being, as with the Empire Crusaders, the introduction of a tariff in
order to stimulate home-production and raise wages, The New
Party was commonly regarded as Left-wing Mosley himself had
been Labour Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in 1929. It was
at first supported and given intellectual standing by such literary
men as Osbert Sitwell and Harold Nicolson, But it was never
numerous, and gradually lost its Labour supporters; what remained
turned Fascist.
By 1931 George Lansbury, the most generally beloved of the
Labour leaders, was invoking Christian principles to solve industrial
troubles. Sir William Joynson-Hicks, who had by this time been
raised to the peerage as Lord Brentford, rose to the bait. Tor God s
sake don t let us mix politics with religion. He who shall not work
shall not eat. There s nothing in the Bible about a seven-and-a-half
hours day. Religion is an individual matter. Bernard Shaw inter
vened in the argument. He praised George Lansbury as an out-and-
out Christian after Christ s own heart, and jeered at the limitations
of English gentility which restrained Lord Brentford from similar
perfection. From George Lansbury s point of view, Shaw said,
Lord Brentford might just as well not be a Christian at all, but an
Antichrist.
The problem, however, was not one that could be solved even
by the religious unanimity of every Christian in the country: it
was an international crisis. All over the world, prices were falling;
this was leading to an increase in the burden of national debts, and
to several cases of national default. World trade was declining,
markets shrinking, interest from investments drying up, foreign
exchanges wobbling. Financial crashes became frequent the
Hatry case was followed by the crash of the British shipowner,
Lord Kylsant, and by the failure and suicide of the Swedish match-
king, Kreuger. Early in 193 1, one of the chief links in the European
banking system snapped the Austrian Kredit Anstalt. A loan from
the Bank of England and a guarantee from the newly established
Bank of International Settlements helped to keep Austria solvent,
but business men lost confidence in Central Europe. Foreign funds
244 THE DEPRESSION, 1930
were withdrawn from Germany; which made the general financial
situation still more precarious. Italy and Belgium both had Budget
deficits, and nearly all countries were starting serious economy
campaigns. President Hoover then put forward a proposal for a
moratorium on the interest and principal of all inter-governmental
debts. Had this been acted upon immediately it might have eased
the situation, but the French objected on the grounds that they
would lose most and the Germans gain most. The financial drain
on Germany, in the form of reparation payments under the Young
Plan therefore continued and German banks began to fail. A con
ference was called in London to deal with the German situation.
..Only the French were in a position to grant long-term loans, but
they wanted political guarantees before they would do so. A dead
lock followed. The effect upon many Germans was to convince
them that only a policy of national self-sufficiency would rid them
"of the danger of complete financial and industrial collapse. This
feeling the rising Nazi movement was able to exploit.
The Macmillan Report on Finance and Industry revealed the
dangerous condition of British national economy, and the Report
of the May Committee on National Expenditure forecast a Budget
deficit of f 120 million. This led to the withdrawal of foreign funds
from Britain and the depreciation of Government securities. Loans
had to be obtained quickly from Paris and New York. The situa
tion was so serious that on the 2 3rd August 193 1 a National Gov
ernment was formed which included Conservative, Liberal, and
Labour members. The bulk of the Labour Party, however, and
many Liberals, refused to follow their leaders, whom they accused
of having been stampeded by the Conservatives into betraying
their party principles. On September 9, the new Government
brought in an Economy Bill, involving a 10 per cent cut in the
money available for Government wages. In the Navy the mistake
was made of taking a flat shilling a day from the pay of all ranks,
from admirals down to ordinary seamen. This shilling was a serious
matter to the Lower Deck and there was a strike among ratings
of the Fleet at Invergordon. They refused to put to sea. The Gov
ernment soon capitulated, for the strike had been decently and
respectfully managed, like the famous Mutiny at Spithead in the
eighteenth century: the cuts were revised on a percentage basis.
The Admiralty felt obliged to make an example of twenty-four
THE DEPRESSION, 1930 245
ratings, who had been unwise enough to appear as ring-leaders, by
dismissing them from the Service. The further mistake was made
of hushing up the story of the strike, distorted news of which
reached the foreign Press. It was there represented as an ugly
mutiny. Britain seemed to be on the verge of a social revolution,
and more foreign funds were hurriedly withdrawn. In order to
stop the export of gold, the gold standard was suspended; and the
pound sterling found its true level at 70 per cent of its gold value.
On October 6th, a General Election was held on the plea thatx
the National Government needed a "doctor s mandate 7 from the
people. The Opposition Socialists made use of the Invergordon
strike in their electioneering. Posters were published with an illus
tration of the Battle of Jutland, and the caption: The British Navy
at Jutland in 1916 beat the ex-Kaiser, and at Invergordon in 1931
it beat Mr. Montagu Norman. Montagu Norman was the Gov
ernor of the Bank of England. The posters caused concern among
those who still did not wish the public to know that there had
been a strike at all. Admiral Dewar, however, late of the Royal
Oak and now a Labour candidate for North Portsmouth, told
reporters that the posters merely stated facts. They were said
to have been published by the Co-operative Movement, although
A. V. Alexander, the Labour ex-First Lord of the Admiralty and
one of the leaders of the Co-operative Movement, denied any
knowledge of the matter. Then the popular Conservative Press,
which often attacked the Co-operative Movement in the interests
of private tradesmen and merchants, came out with headlines
such as Co-operators Insult to the Navy . In the election several
prominent Labour and Liberal leaders were on the National side,
and joined in a strong appeal to the country for united action .
The National Government gained 554 seats, and the Labour oppo
sition, led by Arthur Henderson and George Lansbury, only 52.
The Liberal opposition sank to a mere 16. MacDonald remained
Prime Minister, and in his Cabinet Baldwin served as Lord Presi
dent of the Council and Sir John Simon, as Liberal leader, Foreign
Secretary.
Among the economies immediately introduced by the National
Government were cuts in unemployment benefit. These were
effected by the Means Test, which reduced what was known as
transitional benefit by withdrawing it from people who could be
246 THE DEPRESSION, 1930
proved to have savings to fall back on, or moneyed relatives to
support them. The popular name for unemployment benefit since
June 1919, when the Daily Mail first coined it, had been the dole 7 .
This was conveniently brief for headlines and general use but
carried the invidious sense of an idle city mob living on the charity
of the governing classes. The Press with almost the sole exception
of the Daily Herald and the Liberal newspapers represented the
unemployed as people too idle to seek work, and the dole as a
comfortable wage. An article in Good Housekeeping, an Amer
ican-style monthly magazine for prosperous housewives, brightly
referred in July 1926 to Trofiteers, dole-drawers, music-hall artists
in fact the only people who have money to-day . The truth was
that most working people had a strong aversion to public relief
and at first would have preferred to work for less than the pittance
that they drew in the form of unemployment benefit, if there had
been work to do. But as unemployment increased, and the Govern
ment could do nothing to remedy it, there came to be distress
areas* where villages were on the dole, and all scruples against ac
cepting Government money faded. The weekly payment was
enough to keep the people alive but not enough to keep them in
good physical condition to undertake any work that unexpectedly
offered. In such villages they lived a down-at-heels aimless life,
eking out their payment with a little vegetable growing, poaching,
and such casual labour as would not affect their right to continue
as pensioners. Unemployed in the towns were far worse off,
with nothing to do but hang about at street corners or mope at
home.
The Means Test aroused fierce anger among the unemployed
against MacDonald and the old Labour leaders, who were accused
of betraying their class . A party of unemployed Welsh miners
marched to put their case before the T.U.C., which was meeting
at Bristol. Demonstrations were held in Parliament Square, Lon
don, and the crowds were charged by the police. The National
Unemployed Workers Movement organized Sunday afternoon
meetings in Trafalgar Square. Civil Servants held a meeting at the
Albert Hall. In Birkenhead fighting went on for three days be
tween demonstrators and police: bottles were thrown at police
officers, the spikes of park railings knocked off and used as mis
siles, and the windows of Conservative Town Councillors houses
THE DEPRESSION, 1930 247
smashed. In retaliation the police carried out raids on working-
class tenements and made indiscriminate arrests.
At the same time a National Hunger March was organized from
the provinces to London. There had been hunger-marchers in
the Middle Twenties, but by scores rather than hundreds, as now.
Two thousand five hundred marchers bore a petition signed by
a million people, demanding for the abolition of the Means Test y
They were welcomed by crowds of workers in Hyde Park, but
the police charged them with batons. A violent skirmish took place
in which one hundred people were injured and fifty arrests made/
Most newspapers attacked the marchers as being instigated by
the Reds, observing Bolshevik discipline, and wilfully baiting the
police. The petition was never delivered to Parliament. It is said
that the leaders of the marchers put the unwieldly document for
safety in an Underground railway cloakroom, and accepted a re
ceipt as guarantee of its safety; they did not lose the ticket, but
the cloakroom most unaccountably lost the document. Another
uncomfortable scene, as at the presentation of the Chartist petition
in 1848, was thus avoided in the House, and the Press spared
the necessity of declaring, as on that occasion, that two-thirds of
the signatures were forgeries. However, the authorities were
alarmed into granting extra relief in most parts of England.
The general unrest was accompanied by a growth in Left feel
ing. Now that the Government was behaving in an apparently
reactionary manner, the dissatisfied elements in the working class
were joined by equally dissatisfied elements in the middle and
upper classes. University undergraduates and, in general, the chil
dren of prosperous families felt their conscience disturbed by
hunger-marchers and the Means Test and their own comfortable
existence. They no longer felt obliged, as during the General
Strike, to rally to the support of the Government against a sup
posed revolution of the proletariat. The presence of Labour leaders
in the Government broadened the issue to one of human justice.
Anti-Governmental Labour clubs at the universities greatly in
creased in membership and by 1931 students were not only wel
coming hunger-marchers but even marching with them. A few x
went to die extreme of calling themselves Communists especially
at die elder universities, where the test of being advanced was no
longer whether one understood modernist poems, but whether one
248 THE DEPRESSION, I 9 JO
understood Marxism. A magazine founded at Cambridge in 1932,
Cambridge Left, published Marxian analyses of literature and
poems about the class-struggle. The Communists, the party of the
militant unemployed, had in 1930 been able to collect enough sup
port from moneyed people to start a new daily paper, the Daily
Worker.
The intellectual Left was demanding a clear-cut Labour policy
to set against Ramsay MacDonaldism. Ginger-groups appeared,
such as the Socialist League founded by Sir Stafford Cripps and
H. N. Brailsford. John Clynes, the former Home Secretary, who
was one of the few Labour Ministers not to join the National
Government, declared that Socialism had never been tried. He
welcomed the new Labour policy of nationalization, by which
the Bank of England and the joint-stock banks were to be publicly
owned, and key-industries, such as those supplying transport,
electricity and gas, were to be managed by public utility corpora
tions. Lansbury gave his opinion that Capitalism had collapsed, as
Marx had said it would, but that Socialism had not come into
being, because Socialist teaching was not widely enough spread.
To remedy this, the New Fabian Research Bureau, and other kin
dred organizations, began to pour out Socialist pamphlets. G. D. H.
Cole s Intelligent Man s Guide Through World Chaos, 1932, had
a big sale. Cole pointed out how essential it was for everyone to
know something of economics: I believe that the understanding of
present-day economic problems is not really so hard a matter as it
is often made out to be. ... The General Election of 193 1 turned
largely on such economic issues as the "balance of trade", the
dangers of "inflation", the effects of going off the "gold standard",
and the case for and against "tariffs". Everyone had to have views
about these questions or to act as if he had views about them.
In every country the world slump has forced the questions into
the forefront of political controversy. Cole set himself to explain
economic problems from a Socialist standpoint, and followed up
his book with several others.
Newspapers in the Thirties discouraged the general desire to
study economic and political problems. The popular Press pro
vided brighter and brighter story news, but never any helpful
analyses of the world situation. It occasionally made news-stories
THE DEPRESSION, 1930 249
of the latest economic panaceas: for instance in January 1933 the
Daily Mail printed an article by Professor Soddy on the theory
of Technocracy, which had been running wild in the United
States for several months. The theory of Technocracy was that,
since this was the Machine Age, national governments should be
run by technicians. It resembled Italian Fascism in that the chief
industrial technicians employers and employees were to regu
late them. Technocracy also stood for abolishing the price-and-
wages system: people were not to be paid in money but in energy-
certificates for work done, entitling them to share in the general x
abundance which machines made possible. Pamphlets on Tech
nocracy were added to the huge politico-economic literature which
was challenging the works of Edgar Wallace, Elinor Glyn, and
Edgar Rice Burroughs as the chief reading of the people.
The National Government, meanwhile, was pursuing a policy
of financial retrenchment . Neville Chamberlain, the Chancellor
of the Exchequer, believed in increased taxation and increased
saving. Interest on the War Loan was dropped from 5 per cent to
3 1 / 2 per cent. An Exchange Equalization Account was set up in
order to counteract short-term speculation and regulate foreign
balances. German reparation payments, after the Dawes plan had
been succeeded in 1929 by the still milder Young plan, were abol
ished in 1932, and England applied to the United States for can
cellation of war debt also. The United States, feeling the financial
pinch more and more, though most of the world s gold supply
had flowed there since the war, refused, and Britain thereupon
paid in gold. France defaulted, and, the next year, encouraged by
her example, Britain made a token-payment only, American public ,
opinion was inflamed and in the following year after that the
United States refused to accept token-payments. The British Gov
ernment thereupon made no further payment of any sort, and
ingenious articles were published in extenuation of this default
to show that indirectly America had in effect been paid the whole
of the war debt, and more. But public relations between the two
countries remained strained for some years.
In February 1932 tariffs, which had caused so much contro
versy in the past ten years, were at last introduced. An Import
Duties Act imposed a 10 per cent duty on all imports except
250 THE DEPRESSION, 1930
wheat and meat. This was greeted in the popular Conservative
Press as the long wished for funeral of Free Trade. Philip Snow-
den, however, who had now been made a viscount, attacked Pro
tection as criminal, and accused the Government of gambling
with the vital interests of the country . When the Ottawa Agree
ments, establishing Imperial Preference, were signed, Lord Snow-
den and two Liberal leaders, Sir Herbert Samuel and Sir Archibald
Sinclair, resigned from the Government. Lord Snowden had de
clared in 1930, on the failure of the Imperial Conference, that the
Dominions wanted Britain to make all the sacrifices, and J. EL
Thomas had called the Canadian offer of preference humbug . In
1932, Lord Snowden, at least, had not changed his mind. Neville
Chamberlain, however, spoke for the National Government, and
for most people in the country, when he declared that Ottawa
was the crowning achievement in a year wonderful in endeavour .
England was now committed to a policy of planning commerce by
bilateral treaties with other countries. The Ottawa Agreements
were followed by special, most-favoured-nation trade treaties
with the Argentine and the Scandinavian countries.
The Wheat Quota scheme was an instance of the new system of
openly regulated economic production. It laid down that a fixed
percentage of the total amount of wheat consumed in Britain
should be British wheat. This was intended to guarantee the sale
of British farmers crops. Marketing Boards were also set up to
control the sale and distribution of milk, potatoes, hops, and pigs.
State-control was, in fact, everywhere being extended. Already
there were public utility services, such as the B.B.C. and the Cen
tral Electricity Board. To these was added the London Passenger
Transport Board, which took over control of all London buses
and tubes from the various private companies. Traffic Commis
sioners were also appointed to regulate the transport of goods in
Britain, and to modify the competition between road and rail.
The gradual tendency towards socialization was inescapable.
This extension of State control was soon challenged, but not at
first by the Left, which had not yet come to fear that by these
means Democracy might be quietly converted into Fascism. The
challenges came from the lawyers. Lord Hewart, the Lord Chief
Justice, wrote The New Despotism in 1930: in it he criticized
THE DEPRESSION, 1930 25!
the powers that Ministers, and the boards set up by them, were
acquiring to issue orders that had the force of law. The orders
were always meant to apply to special subjects and Lord Hewart
did not attack them as unnecessary. What he did deplore was
that most of them were neither examined nor given particular
sanction by Parliament, and that there was thus no constitutional
check on the law-making activities of Government departments
and local bodies. A similar book, Bureaucracy Triumphmt by
C. K. Allen, published in 1931, pointed out that judicial as well as
legislative powers were being delegated to local and departmental
bodies. Special tribunals were now allowed to settle legal ques
tions of right and wrong, as well as purely administrative matters,
nor was there any appeal from these tribunals to any ordinary
court of law. The Law was no longer kept strictly independent of
the Administration, as democratic theory held it should be in order
to preserve its judicial impartiality.
No steps were taken to prevent the growth of an all-powerful
bureaucracy, though complaints against it continued to be made.
In 1936, Sir Ernest Benn the publisher, in his book Modern Gov
ernment as a Busybody on Other Men s Matters, wrote that it
had become almost sacrilege to suggest that anything could be out
side the scope of Government; and that the view that all private
resources, intellectual and material, were governmentally con
trolled was all too readily accepted.
The future of India was another serious problem in the early
Thirties. A commission under Sir John Simon had been sent out
to India in 1927 to report on the situation. The Indian Congress
was at that time demanding independence and following a policy
of civil disobedience . In 1930, Mahatma Gandhi was conducting
a movement for the boycott of British goods, especially of cotton.
In April, accompanied by eighty-four followers, he undertook
a march of two hundred miles from Ahmedabad to Dandi as a pro
test against the new tax on salt. When they reached Dandi, a small
town on the shores of the Arabian Sea, Gandhi retired to .medi
tate; then he addressed his followers, and afterwards set them to
work on the shore with buckets and spades to dig for salt. In his
speech Gandhi said: Resist the confiscation of salt from your
midst with all your might till blood is spilt. All women and chil-
252 THE DEPRESSION, 1930
dren should also resist interference. Let us see whether the police
dare touch our women. If they do, and if the sons and daughters
of India are not so emasculated as to take such an insult lying
down, the whole country will be ablaze/ Although digging for
salt was a punishable offence under the new Salt Law, the police
did not interfere. The few ounces of salt that Gandhi himself dug
up were sold for 32.
Riots followed in the chief towns, where tramcars were burned,
and raids on Government arsenals were made. In one such raid at
Chittagong the sentries on duty were shot. The British Press de
scribed this as an outrage and called for an Iron Hand . The Gov
ernment, however, did not want to exasperate Indian opinion.
The Simon Commission had just made its report and a Round
Table Conference was to be called to work out a federal Consti
tution.
The Conference began its deliberations in November 1930.
The popular Press published many photographs of Indian princes
in their picturesque robes and contrasted their protestations of
loyalty with the seditious declarations of Congress. In 1931,
Gandhi himself came to England to attend the Conference. His
emaciated body and his loin-cloth earned much publicity. Un
fortunately, he failed to establish any personal contact with the
Prime Minister. He fell among Left-wing people, and so alienated
himself from the Government, which had at first been in favour
of negotiating directly with him. At the Conference he often con
tradicted himself, and always seemed tired. The Sunday Express,
in September 1931, reported that his friends confessed him to be
out of his depth in England, and to be doing nothing to help
solve the many questions with which the Conference was dealing.
He returned to India with some loss of prestige.
The Conference continued its sittings until 1932, and its con
clusions were published in a White Paper in the following year. A
Federal Constitution was proposed which would give autonomy to
the provinces. Burma was to be completely separated from India,
as Ceylon had been in 1931, and given semi-Dominion status. The
Federal Constitution was intended to reconcile the divergent claims
of Hindus and Moslems, the Princes and Congress. In 1934 a Bill
embodying it was hotly attacked by Winston Churchill, who was
THE DEPRESSION, 1930 253
not a member of the National Government, as a surrender to
incompetent extremists; but it finally passed both Houses. Provin
cial autonomy was soon afterwards introduced in India; but Fed
eration was delayed by the apparently irreconcilable claims of dif
ferent sects and parties, and by the natural unwillingness of the
Indian Civil Service to relinquish its functions.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Pacifism, Nudism, Hiking
The effect of the war-book revival of 1928-31 was to refresh
public memory of the horrors of the Great War, and to increase
anti-war feeling everywhere. The Press capitalized this tendency:
the Sunday Express, for instance, in 1931 with a leading article,
They Must Not Fight . The writer observed that nearly three-
quarters of a million more boys than girls had been born in post
war England; and that this might be Nature s way of repairing
the loss of nearly a million men in the war. Yet the Sunday Express
concluded optimistically that these boys had been born at a time
when war was outlawed farther than ever before from civilized
minds.
Germany had recently been admitted to the League of Nations
and the British Labour Government had agreed to the General
Act for the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes, drawn
up by the League of Nations Council at Geneva. To prove them
selves in earnest the Government suspended the building of the
Singapore naval dockyard. That year a new Naval Conference was
held. Britain put forward a moderate estimate of its essential needs
on the grounds of improved world relationship , and Britain, Japan,
and the United States were able to come to an agreement though
not France and Italy. The Italians demanded parity with the
French, but the French pointed out that this would amount to
French inferiority in the Mediterranean, since units of their Fleet
must be stationed in the East and in the Atlantic. The other powers
could not end this deadlock, since all took the view that France s
estimate of her essential needs was too high. Nevertheless, all five
powers arrived at last at a formula which limited the number of
submarines and of capital ships. This was the last positive achieve
ment of the disarmament era.
2 54
PACIFISM, NUDISM, HIKING 255
Briand s new plan for an European Union was having a bad
Press, because most countries feared that it would perpetuate
French military predominance. At the Great Disarmament Confer
ence in February 1932 the French, in accordance with Briand s
ideas, put forward a plan for an international army to be controlled
by the League of Nations. Sir John Simon replied to this on behalf
of the British National Government by outlining a plan for quali
tative disarmament, which would entirely forbid certain kinds of
weapons. A proposal was then made to abolish all bombing from
the air, but Sir John Simon could not agree to this, since air
bombing of villages, after due warning, was the cheapest and most
effective method of pacifying turbulent tribesmen on the North-
West Frontier. A proposal to limit tanks to about eight tons was
also rejected by the British delegation, who wanted it to be twenty
tons Britain had a new sixteen-ton tank undergoing trials. The
French reduced the matter to absurdity by a further amendment,
that tanks should be limited to seventy tons they had been mak
ing experiments in siege-tanks of about sixty tons, (Of the British
sixteen-ton tanks four only were in fact built; the development
of the large fast tank was left to the Germans and the Russians.)
Russia, in order to show up the insincerity of the Capitalistic
powers, declared herself in favour of complete disarmament it
was clear that none of them would agree to it. Thereupon Musso
lini, seeing that the Conference was making no progress, threatened
to withdraw the Italian delegation. In Germany, meanwhile, a,
change of government had brought into power General von
Schleicher, who took up a truculent attitude. Appearances were
saved by the invention of a new formula, which combined the^
German claim for equality with the French claim for security. It
was equality of rights in a system which will provide security for
all nations . New plans were produced for the supervision of arma
ment manufacture in every country.
The Nazis then came into power. Not much notice was taken
of the event in the British Press. On the very day that it hap
pened, 30th January 1933, the Daily Express headline was Hitler
baulked of Power there were rumours that von Papen was to
be dictator. Later in the week, Strube, the Daily Express car
toonist, showed Hitler arriving, rather seedy-looking, at the palatial
Dictators Hotel. Further rumours were published of Army plots
256 PACIFISM, NUDISM, HIKING
against Hitler, of a coming persecution of Communists and Jews,
of Hitler s possibly repudiating the German war-debts. But more
newsworthy at this time, especially in the popular Press, was the
Moscow trial of Henry Thornton and three other Metropolitan-
Vickers British engineers for alleged conspiracy to wreck Russian
industrial plants, and the court-martial of Lieutenant Norman
Baillie Stewart ( The prisoner in the Tower ) for selling Army
secrets for 90 to German agents through a mysterious girl-friend
named Marie Louise.
The general impression derived from newspaper files of that
tune is that Hitler was not taken seriously, because of his fantastic
demand that the one hundred million people of German race and
culture scattered all over the world should be united within the
Reich. His coming to power was regarded as a purely internal
German affair, and it was not thought that he could last long.
When in February the German Reichstag mysteriously caught
fire, the photographs of the blaze were supported with letterpress
giving the official Nazi version of the affair as a Communist arson
plot. Several months later, during the trials of van der Lubbe and
Dimitrov and their associates, the Communist theory that Goering
himself had burned down the Reichstag was pooh-poohed in the
official Liberal and Labour Press, though the Conservative Press
was non-committal. The Conservatives were unwilling to brand
the Nazis as gangsters, because if the fire had been arranged, as the
evidence seemed to prove, this had been done in a good cause: just
as the Zinoviev letter in 1923 (though perhaps not written by
Zinoviev) had been published in a good cause.
When Hitler displaced von Schleicher as the German leader,
the Disarmament Conference grew still less hopeful of results. At
the same time Japan withdrew from the League of Nations a
dispute had broken out between China and Japan and the Japanese
had occupied Manchuria. The League, of which both China and
Japan were members, failed to bring its co-operative machinery
into action against Japan. It awaited a lead from the British Foreign
Secretary, Sir John Simon: but not wishing to arouse the hostility
of Japan, he did nothing. Undeterred by this ominous failure,
Ramsay MacDonald evolved a plan in March for limiting, by
League agreement, the number of planes, ships, men, and guns
allowed to each member state.
PACIFISM, NUDISM, HIKING 257
In Britain feeling against the inefficacy of the League was grow
ing. On the pavement beside Boadicea s statue on the corner of
Westminster Bridge was chalked in large letters: Gladstone, Pal-
merston, and Pitt guided the destinies of the British Empire from "
Westminster not from Geneva/ And yet peace plans were still
discussed. Mussolini produced one for a Four-Power Pact be
tween Britain, France, Germany, and Italy, to come into force
after the Treaty of Versailles had been revised In Germany s
favour at Poland s expense. The Poles protested, and so did the
Little Entente. The plan, which appealed strongly to British Con
servatives, as making an anti-Russian bloc, came to nothing. A
deadlock also arose over the proposal that the period of military
service in conscript armies should be shortened, because the Ger
mans wanted longer service. For a while Hitler seemed concilia-^"
tory, and plans were discussed for the international supervision of
army training. Suddenly, however, on October i4th, the German
delegation received orders from Berlin to withdraw from the Dis
armament Conference. Italy declared that to continue the Confer
ence was useless. Yet negotiations went on Britain leaning towards
an acceptance of Hitler s demands, France set against them, until
the Conference ended in smoke in May 1934.
A similar failure occurred in 1933: this was the World Econo- -
mic Conference, which met to stabilize currency levels. The
United States was immediately responsible for the failure, having
just abandoned the gold standard: American bankers thought "
that stabilization would be unfavorable to them they wanted
the dollar to fall in value. While American delegates were pro
posing formulas at the Conference, and expressing the hope that
stabilization would be attained, President Roosevelt suddenly sentx
a telegram repudiating them. That ended proceedings.
Anti-war feeling expressed itself in many contradictory ways.
Already in 1929 the Labour Government had issued an order that
Armistice Day should be demilitarized: fewer troops were present
that year at the Cenotaph. And now the League of Nations Union
and the Fellowship of Reconciliation were trying to abolish the
annual Hendon Air Display, in order to prevent children from
having their martial impulses stirred. In August 1932 an Anti-War
Congress at Amsterdam was attended by two thousand men and
women, who represented twenty-seven countries. Well-known
258 PACIFISM, NUDISM, HIKING
writers were there, among them Henri Barbusse, author of Sous
Feu y and well-known labour leaders, among them Tom Mann.
Professor Einstein and Romain Rolland were prevented from at
tending only by ill-health. The Congress issued a manifesto
branding tfee.^cg^flict of Imperialist ambitions as the real cause of
war. The future of the human race, it declared, lay at the mercy
of diplomatic disagreements, political crimes and frontier incidents.
War might start at any moment. The manifesto put part of the
blame for this situation on the Treaty of Versailles: the clause that
saddled Germany with war guilt was a flagrant untruth which has
been used by a trick of demagogic mysticism to contribute to the
growth of Fascist reaction in Germany . Yet the Congress used
such slogans as: Stop the Transport of Munitions , Defend the
Soviet Union , Stop the Brigandage of Japan , Break the Fascist
Terror : as though pacifism were a militant power rather than a
negative desire.
Beverley Nichols, an able journalist of the sob-brother variety,
to which Godfrey Winn also belonged, made a popular, non-poli
tical attack on war. His Cry Havoc! was dedicated to those
mothers whose sons are still alive . He objected to the use of the
romantic and heroic word war to describe modern warfare. A
new word was wanted, not narrowed to the historical interpreta
tion of armies in conflict, but which could be applied to the latest
possibilities of blowing up babies in Baghdad by pressing a button
in Birmingham . Nichols went on to attack armament firms as
promoters of war: he blamed them for supplying arms to heredi
tary enemies, such as Turkey and Greece, and thus encouraging
them to make war on each other. (He was unaware that Turkey
and Greece had recently become reconciled.) He also criticized
scientists for saying that gas was ineffective, and dismissed with
contempt the idea that gas-masks could be distributed to all civil
ians. He denounced O.T.C.s for their militaristic spirit at the same
time attacking their training as out-of-date. The League of Nations
disappointed him; its talk of security he found to be only evidence
of fear. Finally, he blamed newspapers and history books for
putting a war-like emphasis on the facts of living. Nichols s book
had a wide circulation, and was probably more effective in incul
cating pacifism by its heart-to-heart unpolitical appeal than the
carefully organized Left movements of the time.
PACIFISM, NUDISM, HIKING 259
Many political journalists surveyed Europe gloomily. Sisley
Huddleston in War Unless , published in 1933, accused the
Press of concealing the dangers of a new war. He complained of
the Balkanization of Central Europe, and of the unwillingness of
the victorious nations to consider essential treaty revisions; as for
the League, its gestures were empty ones: despite its ritualistic
proceedings and conventionally co-operative phraseology it had
become the cockpit of contending nations.
The Government had to face criticism from the partisans of
entirely opposed theories: accused on the one hand of disarming
too rapidly, and on the other of not carrying out unilateral dis
armament and thus setting an example to the rest of the world.
Among those who took the military line was Lady Houston, the
enormously wealthy widow of a shipowner. She published a
letter protesting against the cuts in the defence forces, which the
National Government had introduced, and sent a copy of it to
Neville Chamberlain. She wrote: England is in deadly peril. When
I read the terrible news that our forces of defence already far,
too far, below the safety mark are again to be the victims of
what only Socialists can call economy, every fibre of my being
cried out against this further treachery. . . . To leave our homes
and our children unprotected while every other country is fever
ishly arming is a Socialist invitation to our enemies to come and
destroy us. ... The British Lion, powerless to protect itself, is
now like a toothless old lap-dog that can yap, but cannot bite.*
She also sent a cheque for 200,000 to the Chancellor for the fur
therance of rearmament, and had her expensive yacht illuminated
all night with the legend MacDonald is a Traitor*. She bought the
Saturday Review and filled it with extravagantly jingo articles,
poems and news-items, a great many written by herself. Tanny*
Houston was psychic , not to say slightly touched , and the un
educated extravagance of her style harmed the cause she defended
by bringing it into public ridicule.
The phrase c the next war 7 was used without any calculation
as to who would be fighting whom. It was merely felt that com
petitive rearmament would automatically result in the guns going
off, just for the thrill that the generals would get out of it. The
only actual danger-spot seemed to be the Near and Middle East,
where French, British, and Italian interests were in conflict. The
260 PACIFISM, NUDISM, HIKING
Sunday Express in April 1933 published an article on what would
happen in Britain if war came again. On the first day a dictator
ship would be established a scheme for it was already being
worked out by the higher Civil Servants. All enemy aliens would
be interned; the most rigid rationing would be introduced; con
scientious objectors who refused to do work of national import
ance would be given no ration-cards; wireless sets powerful
enough to get foreign stations would be confiscated and the pos
session of transmitters would be forbidden.
Most war and anti-war talk was now a fanciful discussion of the
horrors and glories of the next war .
Many young men were feeling that war-talk was not just a
newspaper stunt. A representative figure of the time was Lord
Knebworth, who belonged to the generation that had been just too
young to serve in the war. This generation felt itself misunder
stood. It had come to manhood in a time of insecurity, after an
education that presupposed security, and was made to feel inferior
simply because it had not fought for King and Country. As an
undergraduate in 1924, when the papers were publishing Ten
Years Ago pictures of the beginning of the war, he wrote to his
father, Lord Lytton, who was later Chairman of the League Com
mission that reported on the Manchurian affair: My goodness, the
war must have brought things really down to bed-rock but then
afterwards the world spends its time in rebuilding all the artificial
ities which it took centuries to conceive, and which those years of
war shattered into a thousand fragments. In October 1931, having
just become M.P. for Hitchin, he wrote again to his father: The
whole world is sitting on a bomb. It is even chances if it goes off
or not. The world has hitherto existed on a form of slavery de
pending upon having a large number of people poor and unedu
cated and content, while the affairs of the world were managed by
a few people comparatively rich and educated and clever. This is
no longer true and it is even chances what happens. The Capitalist
system has temporarily failed. . . . In the next two years Lord
Knebworth was to find refuge from the pin-pricking, sickening,
doubtful, depressing peace , in admiration for the orderliness of
Italian Fascism, for the discipline of the Catholic Church, and for
the healthy, school-like routine of the Royal Air Force.
PACIFISM, NUDISM, HIKING 261
The most remarkable circumstance of this next war talk was
that the military advisers to the Government did not suggest the
obvious course of reducing the numbers of the Army in order to
meet the public demand for disarmament and retrenchment, while
at the same rime increasing its actual fighting power. This course
had been constantly recommended by the leading British military
scientist, Captain Liddell Hart, at whose insistence, largely, the
Experimental Mechanized force had been formed in 1927 as a
new-styled mobile force to take the place of cavalry. There were
still only four battalions in the infantry-supporting Royal Tank
Corps, founded in 1923. Even by 1933 these had not been increased
and were still equipped with a type of tanks in use ten years
earlier whereas eighteen horse-cavalry regiments and 136 in
fantry battalions were still being maintained. Liddell Hart had
written in 1928 of an ideal strategy for tanks. "The difference in
mobility between an armoured force and a f oot-rnarching force is
so immense that it prompts the question: "Why should the former
assault at all, even indirectly?". . . By constant "in and out"
approaches over the widest possible area, the armoured force might
reduce a vast infantry arm to inertia. Once that happens, a moral
rot is likely to set in among the hungry and helpless occupants of
ineffective positions. In 1933, as Daily Telegraph military corre
spondent, he strongly criticized the trifling sum devoted in Army es
timates to tanks and other mechanized equipment only 348,000,
as against 520,000 in 1927. But the new Chief of the Imperial
General Staff, General Sir Archibald Montgomery-Massingberd,
replied to this that there were critics who said that the Army
should be organized for a war in Europe, but he ventured to say
that the Army was not likely to be so used for many years to
come. Duff Cooper, the Financial Secretary to the War Office,
introduced the new Army estimates in March 1934, with the
words: *I have had occasion during the past year to study military
affairs . . . and the more I study them, the more I am impressed
by the importance of cavalry in modern warfare. He was sup
ported by General Montgomery-Massingberd that November,
when the Nazis had been in power in Germany for nearly two
years: It is certain that if we do not go slowly with mechanization
we shall land ourselves in difficulties. If we mechanize too much,
262 PACIFISM, NUDISM, HIKING
an enormous tail is built up. It is supposed that he meant a tail of
supplies and replacements; but even this did not make sense the
tail of an unmechanized army was twenty times as long.
The fact was that these generals genuinely disbelieved in the
likelihood of war and, this being so, were unwilling during their
tenure of office to face the social implications of mechanization.
For if some regiments of the Army must be sacrificed, to make
room for the new armoured units, the obvious victims were the
cavalry, whose role these units were to take over. But were the
cavalry mechanized, cavalry officers with independent means who
only held commissions from family habit and a love of horses,
would refuse disgustedly to become garage-men and resign.
Most of these generals were cavalry men themselves, and also
fox-hunters, and had for years been defending hunting against
economic and humanitarian critics on the firm ground that it en
couraged the breed of cavalry horses, trained young officers in
cross-country work, and thus contributed to the defence of the
country.
Pacifism had been introduced from Germany at the time of
the Weimar Republic. So had three other libertarian fashions
sun-bathing, nudism, and hiking. Sun-bathing had originally been
found useful in Germany to cure children of deficiency diseases 7
caused by the British blockade and by the severities of the post
war years. It had now become a general cure-all, in disregard of its
stupefying effect on the minds of most of its addicts, and the warn
ing of doctors that long exposure to the sun s rays weakened the
resistance of the skin to infection.
Nudism was of psychological rather than medical origin.
Though some of its more zealous supporters wished to abolish the
consumption of meat, tobacco, and alcohol, as well as clothing,
nudism proper had no such simple-life background. It was sup
posed to eradicate repressions by teaching people to take their
bodies for granted, and to promote health by open-air life and
exercises. A nudist society had to be extremely strict, in order to
avoid all charges of immorality: prospective members must con
vince the secretary of their sincerity and, if they happened to be
married or engaged, obtain the written consent of their husbands
or wives or fiances. The societies tried to keep the numbers of the
PACIFISM, NUDISM, HIKING 265
two sexes equal, but men tended to predominate because a woman ,
took greater social risks by becoming a member.
Nudism was not so popular in Britain as in Germany or the
United States: it was not suited to the climate. At first nudists
gathered in muddy and midge-ridden corners of solitary woods,
but later built luxurious nature-camps, and in the winter held in-/
door meetings with sun-ray lamps. They adopted the Hellenistic
Greek name Gymnosophists , and brought their children along""
with them. After a time most members found the routine of these
camps monotonous, despite the earnest psychological and valetu
dinarian talk that went on in them. Women especially grew bored
sitting about with no clothes, while attracting no erotic interest
in the opposite sex, and being made wonderfully healthy by com
pulsory drill, and by lettuce and tinned-salmon teas. Far better
to wear a bathing-dress on a beach and be conscious of its daring-
ness, than to sit about with no clothes on and with everyone po
litely unconscious of it. At the superior nudist camps, a nice class
distinction was made: the butlers and maids who brought along
the refreshments were forced to admit their lower social standing
by wearing loin-cloths and aprons respectively.
The Press attacked nudism as cranky and immoral. Indignant
correspondents declared that no honourable person would strut
about naked, and that on account of the nudist cult sexual crimes
were becoming more and more frequent. Children should be
brought up not to take an unhealthy interest in their bodies, but
to consider them only as working apparatuses.
Hiking was the most popular of these health movements. The
word came into popular use from the United States about 1927;
when in an article in the Daily Express an official of the Camping
Qub wrote: We have 3,000 members. Most of these are solitary
"hikers" who carry all their kit with them. But the fashion was
German: the if wandervogeT with his rucksack, Tyrolese costume,
concertina (or beribboned mandoline) and singing girl-chum was
the most popular figure in Republican Germany. In 1930 the
Youth Hostel Association was founded to provide cheap country
inns where young people on walking or cycling holidays could
stay for a shilling a night, with breakfast for another shilling. The
hostel-system, too, was German. Hiking was a more ambitious
264 PACIFISM, NUDISM, HIKING
form of rambling: not a mere Sunday s jaunt in country near
home, but a whole week or fortnight of tramping or cycling far
afield.
Hiking began to enjoy a boom in 1931, though the weather
that year was unfavourable. Many new clubs were formed to
organize hiking parties. Provincial newspapers sponsored Hikers
Leagues, which soon had a large membership especially in the
industrial Midlands and in the North. There were communal hikes
to the Aldershot Tattoo, the Portsmouth Navy Week, and similar
events. Because hiking was cheap, many young people were able
to take holidays in the country, which otherwise they could not
have afforded. There were a few Labour and Liberal Hikers
Clubs, but in general the movement escapes the political and
ecclesiastical regimentation to which the German wmdervogel
had been subjected after the first glorious days of post-war liberty.
Increasingly pressed by the competition of long-distance buses,
the railways exploited the popularity of rambling and hiking. On
the morning of Good Friday 1932 the Great Western Railway
ran a Hikers Mystery Express from Paddington which was to
take hikers out into the country, drop them for a hike more prop
erly a ramble and bring them home again in the evening. It was
amusing not to know one s destination; and enough adventurers
turned up to fill two trains. Similar excursions were then provided
by other companies. The Great Western followed up their suc
cess in brightening railway travel with a Kiddies Express from
Paddington to Weston-super-Mare, by which only children were
allowed to travel; during the journey they were entertained by
clowns. Ramblers Harvest-Moon Specials were also run during
the summer months along the Thames Valley. In July S. P. B.
Mais, schoolmaster, journalist and publicist, conducted a Southern
Railway Moonlight Walk over the South Downs to witness sun
rise from Chanctonbury Ring on a Saturday night. There was a
Special Supper and Breakfast Car Train, Experience the novel
thrill of watching a summer dawn from the first streaks to the full
sunrise! Forty people were expected; 1,440 turned up, and filled
four trains. The moon had sunk below the horizon long before
the passengers arrival, and the sun refused to rise to order Mais
had some difficult explaining to do. But the Southern Railway
thereafter made guided rambling a regular service. The L.M.S.
PACIFISM, NUDISM, HIKING 265
started train-tours ; the trains, consisting of special carriages with
large plate-glass windows, were driven very slowly through the
Yorkshire dales and other beauty-spots ; and Romantic Specials
ran from Lancashire and other parts of the north to Gretna Green,
where the blacksmith was supposedly waiting to marry eloping
couples under Scottish law. (Immediate marriages could no longer
be solemnized over the anvil, but Scottish law did at least make a
romantic marriage more easily dissoluble than English.)
Hikers were adopting a special dress that was almost a uniform.
The beret was an untasselled Basque tam-o -shanter that the French
tennis-champion Borotra had repopularized about 1927. It had
been in vogue in 1901 on the northern grouse-moors, but for
women only. Now both sexes wore it, above the same open-
necked shirts, washable shorts, and waterproof rucksack. Those
who wished to be independent of hostels carried, besides their
change of clothing, aluminum cooking utensils, primus stoves, and
oilskin tents. A complete hiker s outfit weighed about twelve
pounds; the rucksack was usually built on a steel frame so that
it did not slump against the back, but allowed a cool passage for air.
In 1934 the subject of hikers dress came up in The Times.
One correspondent deplored the spectacle of the country s youths
and maidens in hideous uniforms . Why did they all use potato-
colour and khaki? Why not brighter colours? The experience of
another correspondent was very different: in his part of the coun
try most hikers wore disgustingly garish clothes, and dressed like
pirates, with coloured handkerchiefs around their heads he
wished they would go in more for grey flannel what could be
nicer and neater than that? Another correspondent complained of
the hikers nakedness: why did they persist in revealing knobbly
knees, fat legs, and broad hips? Bright colours served only to accen
tuate these deformities. The Bishop of Exeter then came to the
defence of the hikers, most of whom, he said, had only one short
holiday a year and were right to make it as colourful and interest
ing as possible. They strive to add colour to their lives by strange
dresses and eccentric behavior. They are dressing their parts, and
if dress and demeanour raise a smile, it should also be a smile of
welcome and encouragement. Most readers of The Times en
dorsed this plea, and one wrote: When the Bishop of Exeter, be
longing as he reminds us, to a class that lives in beautiful homes
266 PACIFISM, NUDISM, HIKING
and can take holidays in colourful countries, delights his flock
by perambulating his diocese, at the age of seventy-one, on a
bicycle of brilliant vermilion, surely we should have sympathy
with the desire for colour of those whose different lives he so
feelingly describes/
Bright summer-wear of the sort hitherto only worn by smart
visitors to the south of France was popularized by cheap cruises.
This new form of holiday was provided by the shipping companies
at the beginning of the Thirties when the Wall Street crash cut
American tourist traffic alarmingly and they had to do something
to keep their ships in commission. The advertised cruises suited
middle-class people who could not afford Continental holidays
because of the depreciation of sterling, but who wanted a change
from the English seaside. The cruises ran to Norway, Spain and
Portugal, Morocco, the Canaries, and the western Mediterranean.
Ships officers undertook to organize all kinds of entertainments
dances, swimming galas, deck sports, fancy-dress competitions,
concerts, and cinema shows. They became as much comperes of
a prolonged variety show as working seamen. Cruises were one
long party, with the added attraction of visits to foreign ports and
sunny excursions in the hinterland. Many mothers took their
daughters on cruises in the hope of finding them husbands; and the
shipping companies advertised their success as Cupid s agents .
These girls spent most of their day in bathing-dresses or coloured
linen beach-pyjamas and huge straw hats and if possible wore
something excitingly different for every night of the trip.
Clothes in general were now becoming more cheerful in colour.
To knock about in , men wore green and really blue (not merely
navy-blue) trousers, and short-sleeved, coloured polo-shirts and
coloured shorts in lemon, green, burgundy, and saxe. Gay cellular-
woven shirts had come in by 1933 for the use of both sexes: their
mesh of fine holes gave the skin the prescribed healthy ventilation.
The increasing freedom of men s dress was expressed in the soft
white evening shirt with a soft white collar, which was gradually
replacing the starched shirt and collar with dinner jackets. Men s
underwear, too, was changing: short cellular-woven pants with
elastic tops instead of the old long, heavy, closely clinging woollen
ones. Flannel trousers were becoming less uniform and more dig
nified, from the popularity of faint, wide-apart pin-stripes. With
PACIFISM, NUDISM, HIKING 267
these trousers brown suede shoes were being worn a fashion
that, when first introduced at the elder universities a few years
before, had marked the Tansy , or homosexual beauty.
Women s dress had become distinctly feminine. Skirts ceased
to have a single all-day length, but were standardized in three
lengths to the knee for day wear, to the calf for formal after
noon wear, to the ankle for the evening. Women no longer tried
to look boyish, but emphasized their difference from men by
using cosmetics and enamelling their nails. The Sunday Express
in 1931 remarked that one thousand five hundred lipsticks were
being sold in London shops for every one sold ten years previously.
All hairdressers, beauty parlours, large stores, chemists, and
branches of Woolworth s now sold cosmetics and nail-enamel.
The stage of imitating the health and vitality of youth had passed:
cosmetics were used to make deliberate departures from nature.
Blue nails, green eye-sockets, and orange lips enjoyed a short
lived popularity.
The neo-Victorian fashion started by the Sitwells had spread
from interior decoration to dress. Leg-of-mutton sleeves and yards
of seams, gores, and flares appeared. This tendency expressed the
contemporary nostalgia for the secure social life of the Victorians,
and was accompanied by a sudden fashion among well-to-do
women for having as many children as they could afford: to be
prolific had been vulgar in the Twenties. Flowing printed chiffon
in all colours enlivened the summer of 1930, when hats were of
layers of organdie and of lacquered straw. In 1931 the hats were
even more ornate: first there was the feathered bowler, brought
to London from Paris, worn tilted over the left eye. After the
bowler came all kinds of Victorian hats, made to reveal coquet-
tishly one side of the head. Victorian colours plum, maroon, and
violet were in favour. Neo-Victorianism affected stockings too:
pale beige shades, that had drawn attention to the legs, darkened
to brown and mole.
In jewellery the bizarre and barbarous ornaments of the jazz-
ridden Twenties were giving way to elaborately worked stones.
Cameo and other Victorian jewellery came into fashion, and peo
ple went slumming in the Caledonian Market to find it. Jewelled
brooches were worn on hats, corsages, gloves, and shoes. But, not
to forget the neo of this Victorianism, bakelite and chromium-
268 PACIFISM, NUDISM, HIKING
plate were used for accessory ornaments. The chromium-plate
fashion lasted for several years: bracelets, rigid and chain-type
necklaces, ear-rings, buckles, and brooches were made of it. At
one time twelve or thirteen bracelets were worn on a single arm;
at another one large handcuff, three or four inches wide. Bracelets
worn above the elbow were called slave-bangles. Whatever the
particular fashion, the general tendency in appearance of orna
ments was towards the complex, the elaborate and the highly
worked, so far as this was consistent with their function, which
was to give the wearer pleasure without exertion. The elaborate
ness of Victorian women s dress was therefore copied, yet with
out taking over the disadvantages in weight and construction. A
whole complicated toilette could be rapidly removed, and without
the help of a lady s maid, if one wished to get into shorts and a
shirt for an evening set of tennis. This was made possible by a
great simplification in dress-fastenings elastic had superseded
laces; and the press-stud, the hook and eye. Concealed press-studs
often lay beneath a row of decorative but useless buttons. The
metal zip-fastener, which about 1927 had spread from handbags
and purses to airmen s and airwomen s uniforms and winter-sports
clothes, could now be found on every sort of sports garment, in
cluding women s shorts.
The word functionalism was first heard in 1930, applied to
the sugar-cube architectural style imported from Germany. The
Observer then wrote: This is what is called the architecture of
functionalism. The architectural form arises purely out of the
purpose of the building. It was afterwards applied to a great
number of manufactured goods. A functional pipe, for example,
was one that burned tobacco coolly and slowly, cleaned easily,
did not go out, and could be laid down on a flat surface without
ash falling out. But functionally designed objects were usually ugly
in shape. The whole fashion-sense of the Thirties was a com
promise between what was amusing this adjective had suc
ceeded the Victorian chic and the Edwardian smart as a term of
praise for any notably eccentric novelty and what was func
tional .
Fashions in hairdressing had already broken away from the
close-cropped Twenties style. Rolls of curls were worn at the
nape of the neck. The windswept coiffure came over from Paris
PACIFISM, NUDISM, HIKING 269
in 1931: in this the hair was cut short, brushed forward with a
swirling movement, and plastered to the cheeks and forehead in
ragged edges. Most women, if they could not afford the latest
complications, at least had their hair cut so as to allow for an up
ward curl at the back and for generous waves on whichever side of
the head the tilted hat revealed.
As the Thirties drew on, fashions became more amusing than
ever. Day clothes in 1932 were made to suggest all kinds of
male uniform, from Guardsmen s to bell-hops . Guardee over
coats were worn, with braided epaulettes, cord shoulder-straps,
and rows of gleaming metal buttons. They were double-breasted
and had huge lapels extending to the shoulders. The waists of these
coats, and of all dresses, were well-defined and high and went
higher and higher until they began to look distinctly Third Em
pire. This fashion affected beach-dress, too. Floppy, glaring beach-
pyjamas were going out; instead, tailored sailor trousers and vests,
with slim hips and high waists, were worn. In 1933 the artificial
emphasis fell still more heavily upon shoulders. Evening gowns and
summer frocks had shelf-shoulders, with frills sticking out a foot
or so, arranged in several tiers. Shops were full of boas, ruffles,
and frills, all meant to accentuate shoulder-width. With wide
shoulders went high throttle-necks, secured by bows and flounces.
This flouncing tendency was also to be seen in swagger-coats.
These were of three-quarter length; they hung loosely from the
shoulders and fastened only underneath the chin. The emphasis on
shoulders was heightened by a simplification of hats; and the fez
came in. Most women wore them in the simple North African
shape, but for the very smart there were tall, brimless models,
named The Clown and The Paper-Bag , and other crushed and
folded, mediaeval-looking affairs.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The Days of the Loch Ness Monster
Travelling at high speed through space was the first recreation
of the age. T. E. Lawrence in a letter to Robert Graves in 1927
wrote enthusiastically about the Mustfulness of motor-bicycling
across Salisbury Plain at 80 m.p.h., feeling the earth moulding
herself under him, as if it was he who was piling up the hill,
hollowing the valley, stretching out the level place . But many un-
mechanically minded people felt the joy more romantic and acute
when speed was not achieved with the help of electricity or
the internal combustion engine. It was this that recommended
ski-ing, tobogganing down long ice-runs on skeletons in Switz
erland, and surf-riding on the Atlantic rollers of the Cornish
coast. Then there was gliding. There had been well-attended
gliding contests on the Downs at Itford near Lewes as far back
as 1923, but the new developments in 1930 were due to German
improvements in glider design, and these in turn to the Versailles
Treaty, which had put severe restrictions on German aeroplane-
flying. By using air-currents skilfully, once a glider had been
launched into the air down a run-way, the airman could often
climb to a great height and remain aloft for hours. The Daily
Mail encouraged British gliding by offering a f 1,000 prize to the
first person to glide across the Channel and back. It was soon won.
The Daily Mail continued also to offer money-prizes for aeroplane
flights to distant parts of the world.
Amy Johnson was a Daily Mail discovery. She was a young
graduate of Sheffield University, who afterwards worked in a
solicitor s office. She learned to fly in her spare time, became an
excellent mechanic and pilot, and then suddenly achieved world-
fame in 1930 by being the first woman to fly solo to Australia.
She had prepared herself for this flight, which won her 10,000
270
THE DAYS OF THE LOCH NESS MONSTER Zjl
from the Daily Mail, by careful meteorological study and by
learning ju-jitsu and other defensive arts lest she fell among Arab
sheikhs or Dyak head-hunters. She was greeted on her return to
London, at a banquet organized by the Daily Mail, by leading
representatives of women s achievement in sport, the arts, and the
professions. Her speech pleased everyone by her ingenuous phrases
and un-Mayfair accent. The Daily Mail then employed her for
advertisement purposes on a flying tour of England. While she was
following up her first success with other long-distance flights, J. A.
Mollison, a former Royal Air Force pilot, was becoming famous
in the same line of business. He shortened the London-Cape flight
record by fifteen hours. On this journey he scarcely slept and was
so fatigued on his arrival at Capetown that, dazzled by the lights
of the airport, he crashed. However, he emerged unhurt and was
welcomed by Amy Johnson, who happened to be there, with the
words: I think you re wonderful, you hero! Not long afterwards
they were married.
Mollison, on his own candid confession, was a nervous, resdes^
character and well aware that his wife was a better flyer than him
self. Yet they were now the Mollisons and he felt in duty bound
to justify her change of name by showing himself at least her
equal. He tried to break her records. This connubial rivalry
amused the Daily Mail public. In 1933 the Mollisons tried a record-
breaking Transatlantic flight together to the United States. At the
last lap she handed the controls over to give him the honour of
landing; but he pancaked, smashing the plane and injuring them
both. After this, there were rumours of marital divergence, she
continuing single-hearted towards him, he feeling himself un
worthy of her and forming other attachments. The public heart
was harrowed by sentimental forebodings for years before
die marriage was dissolved in 1938, and Mollison married an
actress.
The price that had to be paid, not only by the Mollisons but
by all who came under the general category of public enter
tainers , was constant publicization of their private lives. "News
hawks in the American style were a new feature of British social
life: they were trained to be completely unscrupulous in the matter
of getting their news bribing, lying, breaking confidences. Their
loyalty was to their paper, and the paper s loyalty was to its news-
272 THE DAYS OF THE LOCH NESS MONSTER
hungry public. If the persons concerned in some newsworthy
activity would make no intimate statement about themselves, there
was always a neighbour anxious to earn money by telling what
he knew. The newspapers paid well for beats , as scoops were
now called, and could pay for the best possible legal advice in
protecting themselves against any mistakes made or any acts of
trespass their reporters committed. The editors were as loyal to
the reporters as the reporters to the editors would never disown
them in the style of a Government disowning its spies. It was next
to impossible for a private person to get redress from a paper in
the way of correction of, or apology for, factual misstatements. It
was not that editors and proprietors did not regret any errors that
were made, but that a paper would forfeit public confidence by
any such retraction. The only test of libel was damage to reputa
tion that could be assessed by a jury in terms of money. It was not
libellous to suggest that two prominent young people were en
gaged, however incorrect and socially embarrassing this might be,
unless one of the parties could prove, for example, that the report
had led to the breaking off of an actual engagement to someone
rich, and so caused him or her financial loss. But to sue for libel
in such a case not only led to still more damaging publicity; so the
papers got away with it almost always. And since nearly every
one would give his or her ears to be the subject of even an incorrect
mention in the Press, the public was on the whole very well served.
Discretion in the matter of libel usually kept the papers from
voicing popular indignation against known public enemies; only
when a criminal conviction had been secured or when they were
in possession of a cast-iron case could they comment freely.
The showing up of Yadil, a patent medicine, was a great event
in 1924. Yadil seems to have started as a cure for the diseases of
cows and hens, but it was soon enlarged into a cure-all for almost
every human malady, including cancer and consumption. It was
claimed that it contained oil of garlic. The Daily Mail, which had
had a dispute with the Yadil Company over an advertising ques
tion, decided to expose the fact that an analysis of Yadil by Sir
William Pope, Professor of Chemistry at Cambridge, revealed that
it contained no measurable quantity of oil of garlic: instead there
was one per cent formaldehyde, which medical opinion regarded
as a dangerous irritant if taken internally. The Daily Mail head-
THE DAYS OF THE LOCH NESS MONSTER 273
lined this exposure; refusing to print YadiTs advertisements and
warning the public against it. It also stressed Sir William s opinion
that the garlicky smell of Yadil, which was its most noticeable
characteristic, could be produced by an infinitesimal amount of
a chemical far cheaper than oil of garlic. Lord Horder, the King s
Physician, joined in the attack, pointing out that poor people who
suffered from consumption were being deluded into starving them
selves of proper food in order to buy bottles of the mixture. The
Daily Mail announced in a leader, "Truth in Advertising : TadiTs
impudence went even further. They declared that doctors who
refused to prescribe Yadil were suppressing a cure for consump
tion lest they should lose money by the cure of their patients/ In
reply the Yadil Company issued a writ for libel against the Daily
Mail] they also applied for an injunction against further publica
tion of the exposure, but this was rejected. The chemists shops
then ceased to stock Yadil, the ruined Yadil company never pre
pared its case, the action was dismissed, and the company was
wound up. The Daily Mail exulted over Yadil s withdrawal from
the market.
It is only fair to add that Yadil, whatever its chemical con-^
stituents, had proved effective in thousands of cases where a rise"
of temperature was a leading symptom, and was being ardently
commended by hundreds of doctors. Also, that in homeopathic
pills containing garlic or other drugs the amount would not be
measurable ; that two of the Royal Princes employed homeo
pathic physicians; and that advanced bio-chemists were now prov
ing the homeopathic case for minute quantities of drugs in tritura-
tion as against the allopathic practice of large, crude doses.
In the Thirties there was a hue and cry after Jacob Factor, the
company promoter, who had an unfortunate record in financial
transactions and was in England trying to find supporters for new
schemes of doubtful security. He was successfully impeded in
these. Moral indignation could also be roused against prominent
foreigners who were in no position to bring libel actions. In 1926,
when King Carol renounced the throne of Rumania, though some
papers took the line Royal Romance , others knew their public
well enough to title the story Carol the Cad . His caddishness was
assessed by the number of women in the case. If he had separated
from Princess Helen because he wished to rejoin the morganatic
274 THE DAYS OF THE LOCH NESS MONSTER
wife whom he had been forced, for dynastic reasons, to abandon,
it would have been a romance; actually, he went to live with a
third person, Madame Lupescu. Public opinion now condoned
a single change of heart, but not more: as the police-court ruling
branded a woman who took more than a single lover as a common
prostitute. This principle was applied in 1936 in the Mrs. Simpson
case: she was a twice-divorced woman.
The Press derived a large part of its revenue from lurid crime
stories Mahon the chicken-farm murderer, True the gentleman
killer who managed to escape the ropes by means of a plea of
insanity, Armstrong the poisoner who put arsenic on tea-time
sandwiches, Maltby the tailor who had failed to keep a suicide
pact with his mistress and lived in a barricaded house for six
months with her decomposing body in the bathroom, where he
took his meals; Police Constable Gutteridge murdered by a car-
bandit; No. i and No. 2 Trunk murderers. In crime cases the
Press gave all possible assistance to the police in bringing the
criminal to justice with a single proviso: any new clue that a
reporter unearthed, or that was communicated to an editorial office
by a member of the public, should have its first appearance in
print in that paper. British criminal law forbade the publication
of evidence which might prejudice the jury against an accused
person, but there were papers which often transgressed this rule
in the spirit if not the letter. Judges on more than one occasion
had to protest strongly against photographs appearing of people
against whom a charge was likely to be made, lest this should assist
witnesses in an identification parade, and even against the spiriting
away of witnesses by newspaper men in order to reserve them for
a dramatic statement at the moment most helpful to the paper to
<which they had sold it in advance.
True dialogue in 1928 in the reporters room of a big London
daily:
Small newsboy running in: Case of suicide. Worth half a crown,
Guv nor.
Reporter, eagerly: Police told yet?
Newsboy: No, course not.
Reporter: Woman?
Newsboy: *Yep.
Reporter: Young?
THE DAYS OF THE LOCH NESS MONSTER 275
Newsboy: Mother of five/
Reporter: c Oh. . . . Why did she do it?
Newsboy: Booze.
Reporter: Where?
Newsboy: Down in Stepney, I came running right here.
Reporter: Stepney that s no good. Any last letter?
Newsboy: No, she forgot.
Reporter, disgusted: Tor God s sake, don t tell me she just put
her blooming head in a gas oven?
Newsboy: Sorry, Guv nor, that s what she did. But it s worth
half a dollar, honest, Guv nor. And I brought it here straight away,
same as they told us. It s my mother, Guv nor/
Reporter: *O have it your way, then, blast you! It s not your
fault, I suppose. Here s the blood money!
Newspapermen devoted to their job had an entirely different
set of value from other people. They had to be without hearts.
What gave a news-editor the keenest satisfaction was the break
ing of a big news-story at the exact right time for publication.
Whether its human significance was alarming or cheerful made
no odds to him at all. Romantic royal engagements, such as that
of Princess Mary to Lord Lascelles, or of the Duke of York to the
Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, or the birth in 1925 of Princess
Elizabeth, were only more welcome than a colliery disaster if the
story interest could be spread out over a longer period of time.
When there was no news, news had to be made; and even an unex
pected public disaster was a gift from the gods the private tear
had to be dashed away.
The greatest disaster of the period was the loss of the RIOI. As
a story it broke at just the worst hour of the whole week. This
airship had already made several trial flights: one over London
in 1929, when the Press described it as large as the Mauretanitf.
Twice, in 1930, members of the Lords and Commons had been
invited to take a short trip in it, but each time bad weather had
prevented a start. Rioo, the sister ship, had made a successful flight
to Canada, and it was hoped that RIOI, to which various structural
alterations had been made, would prove even more successful.
The airship left Cardington on a flight to India at 7 p.m. on Sat
urday, October 4th, carrying with it Lord Thomson, the Labour
Air Minister, and almost all the airship experts of the Air Ministry.
276 THE DAYS OF THE LOCH NESS MONSTER
Radio messages reported its progress until nearly 2 a.m., when it
was heard near Paris asking for its bearings. Then no more news
came, and the Sunday papers Vent to bed . Just too late to catch
the news: the airship, buffeted by a heavy rainstorm, crashed near
Beauvais. The hydrogen took fire and everyone aboard was burned
to death but some men in part of a gondola that was torn off by
a tree and fell clear. One of these, a wireless operator, escaped un
injured and telephoned the news to the Air Ministry from Beau
vais. The Prime Minister was immediately informed at Chequers,
the private country-house that had recently been presented to
Parliament as a residence for successive Prime Ministers. Then the
Sunday Press had to recall their worn-out and disgusted press-men
to the office to get up special editions with full details of the crash;
on any other day but a Sunday the afternoon papers would have
been there to take over the story. Air-Marshal Sir John Salmond
and his staff flew at once to Beauvais to examine the wreckage,
special prayers were offered that evening in the churches, and
France proclaimed a day of national mourning when the bodies
were moved to England. Among the dead was Lord Thomson
himself, who had insisted on the flight being made, against expert
advice, because of his anxiety to get back from India to a confer
ence as soon as possible.
Two days later a news-worthy sequel occurred at a seance
held by Harry Price at his National Laboratory for Psychical
Research. This laboratory had been founded in 1925 for an un
biased inquiry into the genuineness of psychical phenomena. On
October yth, Price was holding an investigation with a medium
named Mrs. Garrett; in her trance, she began to deliver messages
from Lieutenant Irwin, who had been in command of Rio i. These
gave circumstantial details of defects in the airship, which were
later corroborated at the official inquiry. Among other things,
Lieutenant Irwin was said to have declared through Mrs. Garrett
that the increased bulk of the airship since its reconstruction was
too much for its engine capacity, that its gas-bags had been leak
ing, and that it had not had sufficient trials before setting out. (The
conclusions of the inquiry into the loss, published in the follow
ing year, confirmed these revelations. It was found that the im
mediate cause of the disaster was the gradual loss of gas due to the
wearing of holes in the gas-bags.) The Air Ministry decided to
THE DAYS OF THE LOCH NESS MONSTER 277
stop the construction of airships; Rioo was dismantled, and the
airship station at Cardington closed down.
A gift from the gods in 1932 was the sensational and protracted
trial of the Rev. Harold Davidson, rector of Stiffkey. The rector
had begun his career as an actor, and, on becoming a clergyman,
had served a small Norfolk parish for twenty-six years. He was
brought up before the Norwich Consistory Court on charges con
cerning his moral conduct. These charges were substantiated by
several girls, some of them prostitutes, in whom he claimed to have
taken a purely fatherly interest. He was found guilty, unfrocked,
and degraded. Davidson made use of his acting experience to pay
for the cost of his defence: one of his stunts was a fast, performed
in a barrel on Blackpool beach. While it was in progress the Black
pool police arrested him on a charge of attempting suicide by star
vation. He was found not guilty, and brought a successful action
for damages against the Blackpool Corporation. He was awarded
382, He continued to exploit his notoriety by public appearances:
one of them on Hampstead Heath at a Bank-Holiday fair in the
company of a dead whale. He next took up with a circus, and
posed with lions in a cage. His end was eminently news-worthy.
At a threepenny sideshow at Skegness in July 1937 a ^on suddenly
seized and mauled him; although a young woman lion-trainer gal
lantly pulled him out of the cage, he died of his injuries.
The great topic of 1933 was the Loch Ness Monster. The mon
ster boom began with a series of circumstantial reports from resi
dents and visitors to the loch. An A.A. scout claimed to have seen
a serpent-like shape in the water; other reports suggested that the
monster was a gigantic bearded eel. Yet when a big-game hunter
went north to investigate, he found a spoor in the shingle by the
side of the loch. Serpents and eels do not leave spoors; which dis
credited the local theories. The Natural History Museum then
gave its opinion that the spoor resembled that of a hippopotamus.
Sir Arthur Keith, the scientist, decided that the monster might be
a legged reptile, but he suspected that it was an illusion and that the
case was one for psychologists rather than zoologists. Others sus
pected a practical joke. Despite such doubts the monster s fame at
tracted thousands of summer tourists. The Catholic monks of Fort
Augustus on the loch side had most of them seen the monster, and
the Father Superior had been aware of its existence for some years.
278 THE DAYS OF THE LOCH NESS MONSTER
Theories multiplied, and so did efforts to trace the monster. A local
ghilly declared that it was an old blind salmon. The most com
monly accepted theory was that it was some sort of whale that
had entered the loch when small and could not get back to the sea.
But if so, on what would it subsist? Someone then tried to detect its
presence with hydrophones; someone else reported having seen it
cross the road with a sheep in its mouth. An old woman disap
peared and her body was later discovered on the moors; she was
said to have been carried off. Mutilated carcases of sheep were
found on the shores of the loch, and the tooth-marks in them were
pronounced to be the monster s. Someone said that it might be a
walrus; but rather smudgy photographs which appeared in London
newspapers bore out the whale theory. The Royal Scottish Museum
suggested that it was a large tunny or shark come into the loch
from the sea. A film was made, The Secret of the Loch*, which
showed occasional glimpses of dark shapes on the water s surface,
but nothing to swear by; however, the proceeds of the film en
dowed a bed for divers at Greenwich Hospital. The monster was
equally a gift to the foreign Press. A Japanese paper said that it
was roaming over the great heaths where Macbeth saw the weird
sisters. On April Fool s Day, 1936, the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung
announced that the monster had been captured and was now on
exhibition at Edinburgh; and reproduced photographs of it by a
famous Scottish zoologist, Professor MacKeenkooF. Yet the mon
ster was not seen again, and interest in it gradually died down.
The Press exploited borderland cases between science and
mysticism, hard fact and prodigy. The usual line taken was to print
the hard facts of a case but without spoiling the story for those
who liked prodigies: Lieutenant-Commander F. Gould, author of
The Case -for the Sea Serpent and similar believe it or not books,
was the best-known journalist of this borderland. Dowsing or
water-divining with a hazel twig was a recognized profession, and
the game of dowsing for metals was taken up seriously and often
successfully in the Twenties by retired Army officers and such.
The police were not too proud to call in the dowser to help them
locate drowned bodies in the muddy beds of rivers; and one dowser
found four such within a few months. There was also a vogue for
diagnosing disease by the same methods of divination: the border
line, however, was generally considered to be overstepped when
THE DAYS OF THE LOCH NESS MONSTER 279
dowsers claimed that they could locate springs or buried minerals
by using their wand over a map of the area of search-, and when
diagnosticians similarly claimed to be able to read disease symptoms
merely from a ring or brooch worn by the patient. A famous bor
derland machine of the Twenties was Dr. Abram s Box . This was
an electrical instrument, not unlike a gramophone, which was sup
posed to diagnose diseases by detecting electrical radiations in a
spot of the patient s blood or in a sample of his handwriting. The
patient had to face west when preparing his sample for the machine.
The Press reported that unscrupulous doctors made enormous sums
from the box, though it had been proved a shameless fake by a
group of eminent scientists. Yet many people remained convinced
of its efficacy and held that the test had been unfairly conducted.
As late as August 1939 the Spectator printed a letter from Lord
Tavistock, inquiring whether in view of the large amount of
money being spent annually on cancer research and treatment, it
would not be a good plan to spend some on the exploitation of the
late Dr. Abram s methods .
The London Press was engaged in a bitter and exhausting cir
culation war. For some time the Daily Express had been compet
ing with the Daily Mail, but real warfare did not start until 1930,
when the amalgamation of the Daily News and the Daily Chronicle
into the News Chromcle, and the reorganization of the Daily
Herald, brought two more large dailies into the fray. The Daily
Herald had been living a hand-to-mouth existence since its founda
tion, struggling on independently of both the Press Barons and the
official Labour Party and constantly appealing for help to its
readers. In 1930 it was no longer meeting expenses, and J. S. Elias
(later Lord Southwood) of Odham s Press, which had also bought
up John Bull, the People, and Sporting Life, at different times,
acquired 51 per cent of the shares; the rest belonged to the Trade
Unions. The deal contained a clause that Odham s and the T.U.C.
were to be equally represented on the board of directors, with J. S.
Elias as chairman, the Daily Herald was always to support Labour
Party and T.U.C. policy. The Daily Herald s role as an organ of
the extreme pro-Russian Left passed to the Daily Worker. The
Daily Herald now came into line with the other big dailies in its
reporting and feature news, and these felt the competition heavily;
for a number of working people who would naturally have sub-
280 THE DAYS OF THE LOCH NESS MONSTER
scribed to the Daily Herald had found it too gloomy for everyday
reading. In 1931, to retain the loyalty of its readers, the Daily Mail
and its associated papers offered prizes for crosswords and other
competitions which amounted to 125,000. The Daily Herald and
the News Chronicle followed the same course, offering 50,000
each, exclusive of crossword prizes, in the course of the year. The
Daily Mail was said to be spending 7,000 a week on house to
house canvassing, the Daily Express and the Daily Herald 5,000
a week, and the News Chronicle 2,500. Enticement of subscribers
to forsake one paper and embrace another now became the rule.
This was not a criminal act, as was enticement of a servant to leave
another s employment, or the alienation of a wife s affections. Free
health and life insurance, with larger and larger awards, was an
other bait offered to catch readers. Competition became fantastic.
Every time that one paper would add to its list some new accident
or malady from which registered readers could benefit by certified
death tram-collision or diphtheria a rival would add still an
other ptomaine poisoning or a bursting household boiler. The
aim of each newspaper-owner was to be the first to reach a daily
circulation of two million. At the beginning of 1932 net sales stood
roughly at 1,830,000 for the Mail, 1,650,000 for the Express, 1,440,-
ooo for the Herald, and 1,200,000 for the Chronicle.
In the course of 1932 newspaper-owners agreed to stop the in
surance war and offer more or less equally extensive policies. But
warfare continued all the more determinedly by means of can
vassing, prize competitions, and free gifts. Newspapers set up
schools for canvassers, and newsagents had a difficult time because
people continually changed their paper as each new bribe was
offered. The free gifts were of all kinds: flannel trousers for hus
bands, mangles for wives, cameras, kettles, handbags, and tea-sets.
In 1933 there was a momentary lull in the war, because the Govern
ment set up a Lotteries Commission to inquire into prize competi
tions; but afterwards newspapers came out with offers of valuable
free books encyclopedias, sets of Dickens and Shakespeare. A
great many families were now subscribing to two or three papers
for the bribes, not for reading. The sales of the Herald and the
Express both reached the two-million mark in July 1933. The
Express reached it first, but at the same time exposed the sales
racket by proclaiming that it had spent 30,000 a week on the task
THE DAYS OF THE LOCH NESS MONSTER 281
and that each new reader had been bought at the cost of 8s. jd. a
head. It implied that from the newspaper-owners and advertisers*
point of view the new readers were not worth having. Upon this,
open warfare ceased: but the Daily Express was left slightly in the
lead. The Daily Telegraph took no part in this circulation war.
Lord Camrose, who had bought and killed the Daily Graphic by
merging it with the Daily Sketch in 1926, had taken over the Daily
Telegraph from Lord Burnham in 1930. Camrose reduced its size,
modernized its type, layout, and general appearance, rehoused it
magnificently and gradually sent its circulation up from 140,000 to
540,000; in 1937 it swallowed up the Morning Post. But though
now a penny paper The Times still sold at twopence it was still
a select Press journal: the difference was in the treatment of news
as contemporary history rather than as drama and in the greater
space given to private as opposed to commercial advertisements.
A curious Victorian revival was that of Nonsense. The success
of A Beckett s forgotten Comic History of England was renewed
in W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman s 1066 and All That, which
proved so popular that it was even staged. These same authors
repeated their success with And Now All This, which guyed golf,
knitting, and other contemporary activities; and also Horse Non
sense and Garden Rubbish. There were several others in the field.
The trend of nonsense was grotesquely violent rather than wistful
in the Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear vein.
Soon nearly all the daily newspapers were running special non
sense-columns. They were written by advanced young men who
drew on their expert knowledge of obscure corners of history and
literature to make jokes so far above the heads of the ordinary
reader as to pass for pure nonsense; though occasionally they
descended to fields of allusion where advanced suburban readers
could feel at home. The Daily Mail began it in the early Twenties
with D. B. Wyndham Lewis, whose real interest was Provencal
literature apologizing profusely for his apparent craziness. (He
also edited The Stuffed Owl in 1930; this was a humorously in
tended anthology of bad verse.) The Daily Express had a winner
in J. B. Morton, who wrote under the name of Beachcomber, and
whose literary, artistic, and social criticism under the cloak of non
sense was, like D. B. Wyndham Lewis s, far above the intellectual
level of ordinary feature-writing for a daily. Of all humorous col-
282 THE DAYS OF THE LOCH NESS MONSTER
umnists of the period the most remarkable was Nathaniel Gubbins
of the Sunday Express. His humour lay not in the bizarre or strained
but in his dry presentation of damp humanity, and in his moral
steadfastness, which seemed grotesque in the world of the Sunday
newspaper.
Roller-skating had once more become a popular fashion in the
middle Twenties after two previous crazes, in the i88o s and 1910*5.
Skating on artificial ice at Prince s had been only for the few, but
in 1929 popular ice-rinks began to be opened in London and in
several other cities, equipped with bands and snack-bars. In 1930
people who normally would have gone to tea-dances spent their
Saturday afternoons at the large new rinks at Richmond, Golders
Green, or Hammersmith, and there learned to waltz, tango, and cut
the classical figures, and watched exhibition dancing from galleries
when the ice was cleared.
Horse racing was helped in its struggle against the competition
of greyhound racing by the introduction of the Tote , or Total-
isator, which encouraged small betting. By 1930, most of the chief
courses had installed these machines; partly because a betting tax
had caused strikes among bookmakers in the later Twenties, and
partly because bookmakers had a bad reputation both for giving
unfair odds and for welshing. Welshing had been facilitated by the
speed and startability of the small car. Like the electric hare in
greyhound racing, the Tote was deplored by old racing men as a
sign of the growing mechanization of sport.
Yet mechanization was unavoidable, as soon as sport became big
business. To please the thousands who crowded to watch football
matches and tennis and golf tournaments, players had to train as
hard as professional acrobats or musicians; native genius or ability
was useless if unimproved by joyless, mechanical training in strokes,
shots or tackles, continuously speeded up by practice.
A charming craze which swept all round the world at this time
was *yo-yo. It is said to have started in South America f yo-yo
being the Spanish equivalent of the English me! me! when a child
wants something. The yo-yo was a wheel wrapped round with a
piece of string. By a flick of the wrist the string was made to un
wind; the wheel ran down it, and then back again as the string
rewound itself. It was not exploitable, as the diabolo craze of 1907
THE DAYS OF THE LOCH NESS MONSTER 283
had been, for national and international competition, or, like Put
and Take, for money-making; it was a very simple personal toy.
Serious grown-up people wandering down the street would ab
sently produce yo-yos from their pockets and jiggle them up and
down.
Midget golf, which came from the United States, was com
plicated. It was a way of providing practice in difficult putting and
approach shots within a limited space. At seaside resorts, outdoor
midget courses with bunkers and roughs replaced the simple put
ting or clock-golf greens; but for the most part it was an indoor
diversion. In 1930 Christmas present recommendations in the Daily
Telegraph included An eighteen-hole midget golf-course com
plete .
Cricket was one of the few largely attended sports that remained
unmechanized; betting on cricket matches was not encouraged and
the high direction of the game was in the hands of the unpaid and
well-to-do sportsmen of the Marylebone Cricket Club. But profes
sional cricketers, who, besides their weekly wage, were paid a bonus
on outstanding performances, always looked out for some new
way of taking wickets while keeping just within the code. They
found one in 1932, and the English team which went to Australia
that winter for the Test Matches gave it a trial. The idea was to
pitch the ball fast and short on the leg side, so that it rose danger
ously at the batsman, who, unlike the American baseball player,
was unprotected above the thigh. The fieldsmen, meanwhile, were
grouped together close on the leg side, waiting for catches if the
batsman protected himself with his bat against this assault. The
Australians called this novelty body-line bowling ; the British re
ferred to it euphemistically as leg-theory . Australian batsmen
were constantly being struck and injured by the leg-theory balls
of Harold Larwood, and protested against them as preventable
brutality . No batsman, they said, who tried to score off Larwood
could avoid injury. D. R. Jardine, the English captain, approved
of leg-theory tactics, and was supported by most British writers on
cricket, who claimed that there was nothing new in trying to cramp
the batsman s range of strokes. The M.C.C. also deprecated the
Australian suggestion of bad sportsmanship, and refused to make a
ruling against leg theory. Feeling ran high in Australia, however
the Australians lost The Ashes that time and there was a threat
284 THE DAYS OF THE LOCH NESS MONSTER
to abandon Test Match tours altogether. J. H. Thomas, as Domin
ions Minister, then summoned members of the M.C.C. to Downing
Street, and, it is believed, urged them not to strain Imperial rela
tions any further. The chief sentimental link that bound the two
countries together, after the Crown, was a common devotion to
cricket. When, therefore, an Australian cricket eleven next came
to England, Larwood was not included in the English Test match
team selected to meet them.
Mechanization was spreading to all varieties of everyday things:
there were moving stairs and ticket-and-change machines on the
London Underground, and self-propelling luggage trucks for
porters at terminal railway stations, and in the streets cigarette-
machines, lunch and fruit-machines. A mechanized restaurant ap
peared, the American cafeteria: one queued up with a tray and
passed between a rail and a chromium-plated counter to choose
from an assortment of ready-to-eat standardized foods. Big stores
and multiple shops, such as Woolworth s, installed cafeterias as
conveniences for hurried customers; but they did not catch on pop
ularly, as milk bars did. Milk bars had an equally mechanized ap
pearance, with bright expanses of glass and chromium, high coun
ters, high stools and machines for mixing tasty milk drinks with
snappy American names. They were introduced into Britain during
the Drink More Milk campaign, and were a relief from the
gloomily old-fashioned pub, or the depressing tea-shop, where one
could seldom catch the overworked waitress s eye. At lunch-time,
or in the evenings after a cinema show, it was convenient to drop
into a milk bar, sit on a high stool for ten minutes and eat or drink
something that looked and tasted wholesome. The design of the
milk bar encouraged quick meals: it was usually open on the street
side, and chilly, and its high stools were not comfortable enough to
tempt anyone to stay long on them. Hearty young men visited
them without shame, instead of showing their manliness by drink
ing beer. Before the war raw milk in any form had been drunk
only by invalids and children; but milk-bars were American and
modern and what was ice-cream, anyway, which all the best
people gobbled greedily in the form of nut or marshmallow
sundaes, but dolled-up raw milk? Another competitor for the tea-
shop and cheap restaurant trade was the snack bar, where hors
d oeuvres, sandwiches, and tasty cold meats could be had at any
THE DAYS OF THE LOCH NESS MONSTER 285
moment of the day. It came in about 1930. The public-houses had
for some time been doing what they could to keep their custom
by combining a simple restaurant business with the sale of drinks;
and began to find snack bars more profitable than the hot lunches
of two vegetables and a cut off the joint .
Since the Talkies were now specializing in spectacular musical
shows, dependent on song or dance hits, the stage competed in the
same line. London theatres were reconstructed with elaborate re
volving stages, for the convenience of rapid scene-shifting. White
Horse Inn 5 and Waltzes from Vienna* were the musical successes
of 1931-
The Victorian revival was affecting the legitimate stage. Not
only Dumas s Lady with the Camellias and Wilde s The Im
portance of Being Earnest were successfully put on, but modern
plays on Victorian subjects. One of the successes pf 1931 was The
Barretts of Wimpole Street , which dealt with the lives of Robert
and Elizabeth Barrett Browning; and in 1933 a play about the
Bronte family had a long run in fact, three pseudo-historical plays
about the Brontes were running at the same time. The costume
play was not, however, limited to the Victorian: in 1933 came
Gordon Daviot s Richard of Bordeaux with John Gielgud as
Richard II. The theme of an artistically-minded monarch, warped
by the early death of his sympathetic young wife, and thwarted by
barbarous philistine barons, had its greatest appeal to the Suburbs,
which were still spiritually in the Twenties.
The most spectacular of all musical, historical, and costume
shows was C. B. Cochran s production in 1932 of Noel Coward s
Cavalcade , a variety show which evoked the sentimental charm,
the belief in progress, and the patriotism of the Victorian age.
Conservative playgoers, who had been accustomed to look upon
Coward as a degenerate, were delighted to find their feelings so
pleasantly stirred. And what a phenomenal piece of stage show
manship: a cast of four hundred impressively brought up to the
stage from below by six hydraulic lifts! Cavalcade was an imme
diate success because it appeared just when a stern national effort
was being made to overcome the Depression. Coward himself rose
to the occasion. In his speech on the opening night he said firmly
and with real feeling: In spite of the troublous times we are living
286 THE DAYS OF THE LOCH NESS MONSTER
in, it is still a pretty exciting thing to be English. The audience
wholeheartedly agreed. The Daily Mail ran Cavalcade as a serial.
The old music-halls, which had housed George Robey, Harry
Lauder, Marie Lloyd, and Vesta Tilley were now nearly all gone,
but variety made a come-back in the Thirties, especially by means
of the radio. A ballot among listeners showed that variety was the
most popular sort of entertainment broadcast by the B.B.C. The
larger cinemas began to include short variety turns in their pro
grammes songs, dances, acrobatics, and conjuring acts. To com
pete with the cinemas, theatres then introduced fast, non-stop
variety. Shows of this kind returned to the old team-principle:
hard-working artistes and comedians sharing a common applause,
rather than jealous stars lording it over miserable stop-gaps.
Only one variety star rose to national fame in the Thirties
Gracie Fields, the singer. A conservative writer, Major Rawdon
Hoare, in his This Our Country, described her in 1934 as the only
outstanding personality who was providing healthy entertainment
for the multitude. In her own way she has done a tremendous
amount of good. In the cinemas there is an absence of healthy
amusement, there is too much sex-appeal: but in the performance
of Gracie Fields we get a breath of fresh air and an opportunity for
some real laughter. This all helps to keep the right spirit of England
together clean living, with a total absence of anything bordering
on the unnatural. Indeed, Gracie Fields s Lancashire accent and
humorous, long-suffering but optimistic sentiment more truly rep
resented contemporary England than slick Americanistic film
comedies or heavily modern problem plays.
The Gracie Fields of literature was J. B. Priestley, whose The
Good Companions and Angel Pavement dealt sympathetically and
realistically with the homely aspects of English life. A. J. Cronin,
a former doctor, published in 1931 his popular Hatter* s Castle, a
novel dealing with the family Jif e of a tyrannical hatter in a Scot
tish town; and Louis Golding s Magnolia Street described the in
timate lives of British city Jews. Realistic American novels were
also being read: Sinclair Lewis s Main Street types, Ernest Heming
way s completely unmoral he-men, William Faulkner s hard-living,
degenerate, poor Southern whites, and W. R. Burnett s pugs,
gangsters and racketeers, had a large public. The prevalent feeling
was against reading books merely for entertainment the radio and
THE DAYS OF THE LOCH NESS MONSTER 287
cinema provided that: people read a novel to acquire factual knowl
edge pleasantly. It was expected of an historical novel, for example,
that though certain romantic incidents and conversations must be
invented, the framework of history should be sound and no major
historical fact distorted.
While fiction was thus becoming more factual, factual books
were being written in a fictional style. Lytton Strachey s Queen
Victoria, which started the fashion, had been as good as a noveF,
and Philip Guedalla s coruscating biographies were "as good as a
modern novel . In 1930, several publishers brought out a series of
short, lively critical biographies of famous men and women, com
missioned from noted authors. At least two hundred such appeared,
and sold very well. Their subjects ranged from Lord Byron to
the Indian Emperor Akbar, and from Saint Paul to Mozart. This
desire for readily assimilable factual truth was met in the depart
ment of science by simply written, rather sentimental books by
Professors Jeans and Eddington on physics and astronomy, and by
such encyclopedic compilations as The Outline of Science by
H. G. Wells, and his biologist son, and Professor Julian Huxley the
zoologist. There was still a great demand for scientific vistas of the
future, especially the To-day and To-morrow series of essays;
and Aldous Huxley s Brave New World and H. G. Wells s The
Shape of Things to Come were their fictional counterpart.
By 1933, however, political and economic facts were seeming
more immediately important than scientific ones. The international
situation was already disturbingly unsettled. It was clear that col
lective security was only a phrase, and that power politics had re
turned in full force. The success of the Coles s Europe To-day,
Vera Brittain s Testament of Youth, Edgar Mowrer s Germany
Puts the Clock Back, and Vernon Bartlett s Nazi Germany Ex
plained, were not signs only of the growing danger of another war:
they showed, too, that the public was anxious to learn how war
situations developed, and how wars might therefore be prevented.
This new seriousness was reflected in the poems of the time. In
the last few years poetical writing, finding no market as volumes of
poetry, had overflowed into popular fiction. Francis Brett Young,
for instance, a highly regarded novelist of the Twenties, had inter
polated comedy and dialogue with this sort of high writing. The
quotation is from his Black Roses: Under the swinging arc-lamps
288 THE DAYS OF THE LOCH NESS MONSTER
the live mass of tourists pullulated, their whitened faces turned
backward toward the ship s bejewelled carcase. Ritchie stood by
the rail, watching them disappear into the mass of darkness that
marked the customs-house; he saw their cars swirl desperately down
the sombre length of roadway that faced the dock where long trams
went crawling and clanking past the unimaginable squalor of
sailors drinking-dens/
But by the Thirties this sort of stuff was regarded as bourgeois
decadent or, in the American phrase that was being used, wet . In
1932 New Signatures appeared: it was this anthology that first
gave publicity to the work of W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and
Cecil Day Lewis. Auden s Poems had appeared in 1930, and in 1932
The Orators, which was meant to study the contemporary situation
in England. Spender s first poems were published in 1933, and Day
Lewis was already publishing a volume of poems every year. Their
work was preoccupied with the grave world situation, especially
as it showed itself in depressed England and in Nazi Germany.
Though only Day Lewis was an active Communist, all three be
lieved that a violent revolution alone or, at least, a violent change
in British life could save the country from becoming wholly de
generate and eventually going the brutal way of Nazi Germany. It
was now believed that poets in the Twenties had taken refuge in
ivory towers , there to conduct meaningless experiments with
words that had no relation to real life; the duty of the poet of the
Thirties was to get into touch with the masses and ally himself
with working-class movements. Auden was a synthetic writer and
perhaps never wrote an original line: but modern literature was so
extensive that his communistic use of contemporary work was not
at first suspected. He wrote satirically of existing British society
and rather vaguely drew the moral that only the teachings of Marx
and Freud and Georg Groddeck could reform it; Spender wrote
poor-little-rich-boy poems, full of genuine pity for the exploited
poor, and for himself; and Day Lewis s sentiments were those of
a simple-minded Red. When they were beginning to attract wider
attention, a new periodical was founded, New Verse, which at first
published the work of all three. New Verse advanced no political
theory. Its policy was to publish poems that dealt with observations
of real objects. The observations were in general listed impression-
istically and tagged with the appropriate revolutionary feelings
THE DAYS OF THE LOCH NESS MONSTER 289
excited in the poet by them. New Verse made no theoretical claims
for itself: it denounced the fancifulness of the experimental poets
of the Twenties, and at the same time avoided aligning itself whole
heartedly with Communism, Surrealism, or any other contemporary
doctrine. The work that appeared in it, though designed to repre
sent actuality, made no evaluation of good and bad elements in
actuality. The Thirties were like that: at least in their unacademic
part.
Another serious periodical was Scrutiny, which was founded by
a group of Cambridge dons in 1932. A manifesto in its first issue
complained that: the general dissolution of standards is a common
place. Many profess to believe (though fewer seem to care) that
the end of Western civilization is in sight. . . . Those who are
aware of the situation will be concerned to cultivate awareness, and
will be actively concerned for standards. Scrutiny proceeded to
uphold and purify cultural standards by publishing learned articles
on educational and scholarly subjects. It adopted a patronizing atti
tude to nearly all contemporary writers, and its circulation re
mained very small. The standards of Scrutiny were critical in
intention, but the moral or philosophical base to which they re
ferred was left vague, for fear of conflict between the spirit of
science and that of Christianity. The Thirties were like that, too: at
least in their academic part.
Low-brow reading was now dominated by the detective novel.
A large number of writers made comfortable incomes from this
fashion, and a curious situation arose. In Great Britain, though a
few score murders and acts of grand larceny took place every
year, not more than two or three of these had features in the least
interesting to the criminologist as regards either motive or method;
nor, in any of these, did private detectives play any decisive part
in bringing the culprits to justice this was done by the competent
routine procedure of the C.I.D. Yet from the middle Twenties
onward some thousands of detective novels were annually pub
lished, all of them concerned with extraordinary and baffling
crimes, and only a very small number gave the police the least
credit for the solution. These books were designed not as realistic
accounts of crime, but as puzzles to test the reader s acuteness in
following up disguised clues. It is safe to say that not one in a
hundred showed any first-hand knowledge of the elements that
290 THE DAYS OF THE LOCH NESS MONSTER
composed them police organization, the coroner s court, finger
prints, firearms, poison, the laws of evidence and not one in a
thousand had any verisimilitude. The most fanciful and unpro
fessional stories (criminologically speaking) were the most popular.
Detective novels, however, were no more intended to be judged by
realistic standards than one would judge Watteau s shepherds and
shepherdesses in terms of contemporary sheep-farming. Of all the
detective novelists of the period only one, the American Dashiell
Hammett, happened to be both a first-rate writer and to have had
a long experience of crime, in his capacity as a Pinkerton Agency
manager. Yet even after his c Thin Man became a screen success,
his Red Harvest, The Glass Key, The Maltese Falcon, The Dain
Curse, and The Thin Mm itself were practically unread in Eng
land.
The hard-boiled American manner, in which there was no moral
dividing line between sleuth and criminal was adopted by Peter
Cheyney and others; and the terse graphic cinematic style by Gra
ham Greene. Greene, an Oxonian, a Catholic and one of the most
admired novelists of the Thirties, wrote in his Journey Without
Maps, on returning to London from the West Coast of Africa:
One was back or, if you will, one had advanced again, to the seedy
level. Arthur Calder Marshall, a critic from the Left, took the
phrase up and characterized Greene s writing thus: The seedy
level! That is the location of Greeneland. The sadist and the
masochist, the impotent athlete, the incestuous brother and sister,
the coward, the braggart, the man with the tic, the hare-lip, the
spy-maniac, the torturer of spiders and the collector of small for
eign coins, the diseased dentist in a foreign port, the one-legged
military man managing a road-house, the rich Jew despised by
aristocrats, the bullied chambermaid in an all-night hotel, the Major
ordering whores by telephone ("a pig in a poke"), the lawyer who
married beneath him lusting after typists who pass his window, the
adulterous butcher; they are all different . . . but all seedy, the
ingloriously vicious.
Agatha Christie remained true in her detective novels to the
romantic-cumbersome English style of the early Twenties. There
were numberless other styles, including even the coldly scientific,
in which microscopic examination of fluff in people s pockets
yielded beautiful results. But the norm was the breathless, familiar,
THE DAYS OF THE LOCH NESS MONSTER
undistinguished, emotional style of Sunday newspaper special re
porting. A detective story was considered well-written if the
denouement was a legitimate deduction from a small piece of
evidence unobtrusively introduced in an early chapter, and if the
suspicions successively cast on a number of persons in the story
were plausible enough to divert attention from the criminal until
the last moment. The reader felt cheated if the author gave either
too much or too little away. In some hands the game grew more
and more like a mathematic based on the supposition that infinity
equals the square root of thirteen: the chain of reasoning was all
that mattered. The geography and chronology of, say, The Scented
Bath Crime 5 was such that it could have been committed only by
someone with a knowledge of Chinese, in desperate need of money,
who could persuade a left-handed negro dwarf to train a monkey
to climb up a ventilator pipe and squirt a rare South American
poison into the victim s hot bath with a syringe through the key
hole at the one short moment when the French maid s back was
turned. . . . Therefore it could not have been A, who did not
need money; or B, who had an aversion to negroes and dwarfs; or
C, who did not know Chinese; but the only remaining character
unaccounted for D, who surprisingly enough was the maid her
self, whose innocence had seemed established by a perfect alibi.
Q.E.D.
For the cultured public, Dorothy Sayers topped the bill with
her case-stories of Lord Peter Wimsey : he derived from the
Baroness Orczy s lackadaisical Sir Percy Blakeney and outclassed
all other detective heroes at least in the fantastic complications of
his cases. Dorothy Sayers gave her lordling a love of rare books
as an endearing foible (in this study, however, he was somewhat
deficient) and made him the hook on which to hang incidental
dissertations on art, music, the poets, and good food and drink. She
was also an earnest publicist of the Anglican f aith.
In spite of strong competition from amateurs who had learned
to earn money in spare time , professional free-lance journalists
in 1930 had a by no means precarious existence: many were earning
upwards of 2,000 a year entirely from the sale of articles and short
stories. A typical issue of the Daily Express in that year contained
not only a short story, a leader page carrying three or four con
tributed articles, and a woman s page, but also a feature page con-
292 THE DAYS OF THE LOCH NESS MONSTER
taining as many as eight short articles written by free lances and
signed by such titles as Pigeon Fancier , Woman Doctor , Psycho
logist , Nursery Expert , and Masseur . The same sort of market
was offered by the rest of the London popular Press and the pro
vincial Press, too. Symposiums contributed by reader-writers pro
vided the newspapers with whole pages of cheap copy, especially
the evening papers, which had for some years been reduced from
seven or eight to three the Conservative Evening News and
Evening Standard and the Liberal Star. (There was no evening
Labour paper.) The Evening News invited people under forty to
say what they thought of those over forty, later throwing open its
columns to the over-forties to get their own back. Then followed
symposiums of war stories and Cockney humour; and readers
were asked to tell of their most thrilling or romantic moments, to
send in their most beautiful love-letters. A small fee was paid for
everything printed, and a prize given for the best contribution of
the week. Later in the Thirties the Evening Standard devoted an
entire page in its Lunch Edition to drawings, short stories, articles,
and poems contributed by non-professional writers.
It had been generally agreed that the short story was good only
for desultory holiday reading or for longish railway journeys. The
oldest and most reliable popular fiction-monthly was the Strand,
Its list of contributors changed little from year to year. Stacy
Aumonier, E. Phillips Oppenheim, P. G. Wodehouse, Dornford
Yates, and the rest were names that smelt of the station-platform
and restaurant car. The Strand had several imitators, but collections
of short stories in book form were unpopular in the public lib
raries: Oh it s only short stories! In the Thirties the commercial
short story, as taught by the schools of journalism, displaced the
thriller feuilleton in the evening papers, and to some extent in the
dailies. It was limited to fifteen hundred words, depended more on
incident than on characterization or atmosphere, and was composed
backwards, from the whip-crack ending as invented by O. Henry.
This was a great free-lance field. One interesting limitation was
that sexual immorality, while it could be glorified in seven-and-
sixpenny novels, or in collections of short stories, could not even
be condoned in the commercial short story. The popular Press
found that its circulation contracted very sensitively when any
thing not for family reading accidentally crept into its columns.
THE DAYS OF THE LOCH NESS MONSTER 293
A characteristic of the Thirties in England was an attempt to
be reasonable about the confusion into which the new theories
of physics, astronomy, sex, and economics had plunged thinking
people. Things were, it had proved, effectively the same as ever:
foot-rules still measured accurately, the stars still twinkled mildly,
the Wedding March still pealed out at church weddings, and in the
words of Len Lye the film director whose short colour films for
commercial firms and the G.P.O. were the most original and divert
ing of the day money is like marriage: still in use . Neo-Vic-
torianism was a brave new facade to a house whose foundations
had been shaken by heavy mechanized traffic. Inside there was a
general consensus of opinion: never to do what the Russians had
done and the Germans and Italians were doing pull the house
down and build up from new foundations but to continue patch
ing and revetting and bracing so long as it would stand. The coun
try was still sound at heart; the British Empire still extended over
one-quarter of the earth s surface; and the population of Great
Britain was still slightly on the increase though, to be sure, this
was because the death-rate was declining faster than the birth-rate,
and (if the statisticians were right) Britain in 1980 would be popu
lated chiefly by elderly people.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Recovery, 1935
England was recovering slowly from the Depression, which at its
worst had thrown nearly three million people out of employment.
The common conviction that a vigorous replanning of the demo
cratic, capitalist system would bring about complete recovery was
expressed by Sir Arthur Salter in his book Recovery: the Second
Effort. Sir Arthur, who had been Chairman of the Allied Maritime
Transport Executive during the war, and was now an Oxford pro
fessor of political theory, believed that planning could be made
compatible with freedom; and that a planned society was essential,
if the country were not to wheel round continuously in the familiar
cycle of trade, from slump to recovery and back to slump again.
Planning had to take all factors into account: economic, political,
social, and personal. Human activities were now so closely interre
lated that no one aspect of them could be separately treated: plan
ning must therefore be on a world-wide scale. Had there been no
special features in the Depression, Sir Arthur Salter considered, the
world would already have recovered. But there were special
features, and chief among them were the restrictions on the free
dom of world trade, induced by the trend towards economic na
tionalism. The Depression had originally taken the form of a finan
cial crisis. Whatever steps governments had taken to cope with it,
their effects had been uniformly to reduce prices and incomes, cut
down production and increase unemployment generally, in fact,
to lower the standard of living. Foreign trade was especially af
fected. Most governments had been trying to give their countries
favourable trade balances that is, to sell more than they bought. It
was easier, however, to restrict buying than to extend selling, and
so countries had actually tried to buy less than they sold. Their
immediate aim was to save their currencies from depreciation and
294
RECOVERY, 1935 2 95
this they did chiefly by using tariffs to cut down imports. But it
was the nature of international trade that if one country restricted
imports, other countries had less money with which to buy its
exports. Thus the circle of trade-relationships continually con
tracted; and with this failure in economic co-operation natu
rally went a decline of international goodwill in the political
.sense.
What Sir Arthur Salter was putting in economic terms, a very
great number of people were putting in terms of common sense
and elementary morality. However necessary restrictions might be,
if the existing financial system were to be preserved, it was obvi
ously iniquitous to reduce the amount of goods available, when
millions of people lacked many of the barest necessities of life.
General indignation was felt that food should go to waste merely
because it could not be sold at a profit to producers. The Left, in
particular, attacked restriction-schemes as a blatant instance of
Capitalist greed and mismanagement. There was an outcry when
the number of acres in Canada to be sown with wheat was limited,
and another when thousands of tons of good Brazilian coffee were
thrown into the sea, and still another when Roosevelt s Democratic
administration paid farmers and cotton growers not to pile their
produce into an already glutted market. These protests had an Old
Testament prophetic ring, for there was a large Puritan element in
the English Left; but more often they were phrased ironically, as if
the crazy situation was beyond hope. H. N. Brailsf ord, for instance,
in his book Property or Peace (1934), suggested that a new kind
of Harvest Thanksgiving should be held: At our paradoxical har
vest-home let us celebrate these phantom apples, this mermaids
coffee, this cotton that shall not ripen in the sun, and with them the
dream cities they might have built. The old plan of inviting the
ancestral ghosts to this festival has much to recommend it: we
might entertain these guests with our potential wealth much as the
Chinese burn paper-offerings to nourish them. ... Let us honour
the ruler who contrives that one ear of wheat shall grow where
two grew before. . . . We may congratulate ourselves not merely
on our potential wealth, but also on the steady diminution of the
toil required to win it. It grows sensibly easier with every year that
passes to brew coffee of an excellent flavour in the Atlantic Ocean,
nor need one spend upon such tasks an excessive number of hours.
296 RECOVERY, 1935
Such strong condemnation of the existing system was not confined
to Socialists: indeed, Socialism gained few recruits merely by de
nouncing the effects of the Depression. It was rather international
political events that now sent people to the Left, and for a solution
of economic troubles they were attracted by more plausible reme
dies than a revolution of that unarmed and feeble minority, the
British proletariat, formerly called the Submerged Tenth . Chief
among these was Social Credit.
Major C. fL Douglas, a retired Royal Engineer, had been pro
pounding his theory of Social Credit in a series of books and
pamphlets for over ten years. In the Thirties a Social Credit party
was formed; its members adopted the new political habit of wear
ing coloured shirts as uniforms, and chose green. The Daily Mail
honoured the party with a mention in its Year Book for 1935. Seri
ous economists criticized it in the serious weeklies, and T. S. Eliot,
who had banking and commercial experience as well as literary
eminence, welcomed it as a promising solution of the world s
troubles. By 1935 the movement had spread to the Dominions. In
Alberta, Canada, a Social Credit party was elected to the provincial
legislature, pledged to distribute dollar bills periodically to the elec
torate. But like all economic plans, however sound in general
theory, it could not be applied in a single isolated context, and
many banking and business interests in Alberta took flight to other
provinces of the Dominion; so that the Social Credit party, which
was not even unanimous on practical policy, was starved into sur
render.
The Social Credit plan was to distribute national dividends to
everyone through the central banks. The basis of the value of these
dividends was supposed to be the capital equipment and the energy
possessed by the community. The present financial system, Major
Douglas held, did not reflect the real credit of the community. To
prove this, he developed a theory meant to show that some of the
country s income was continuously lost by the interest charges of
the banking system. Dividends for All would remedy this by
bringbg a country s purchasing power up to the level of its pro
ductive power. Social Credit took for granted that modern science
enabled productive power to be increased limitlessly, even to the
point of luxury for all. From this followed the first step in its argu-
RECOVERY, 1935 297
ment: that only a lack of purchasing power prevented the masses
from enjoying the natural increase.
Serious people were glad to find a theory which seemed to pro-/
vide a non-political solution for the world s troubles, the more so
because the banks seemed the obvious scapegoats for the Depres
sion. Not many people knew what was the function of banks, and
the rest could easily be induced to look on them as concerns that
exploited the public for the benefit of their directors. Major Doug
las himself, however, pointed out that he regarded bankers not as
dishonestly anti-social, but as victims of their own system. He wrote
in 1934 of the necessity for exalting the individual over the group.
I mean by that, the exact opposite of what is commonly called
Socialism. The direct road to the emancipation of the individual
from the domination of the group is, in my opinion, the substitu
tion, to an increasing extent, of the dividend in place of the wage
and the salary . Such words were more than welcome to people
who feared that their lives would be exactly regulated by Socialist
or Totalitarian economics; but neither the orthodox nor the Social
ist economists had any difficulty in pointing out the flaws in his
argument. The Social Credit theory was never adopted by any
influential political group in Great Britain. It merely provided
another controversial topic.
That something was wrong somewhere, whether in the Qty or
at Westminster, seemed obvious from the existence of Distressed
Areas. These were parts of the country where heavy industries had
been built up before the war, but where almost the whole popula
tion had now been thrown out of employment by the loss of for
eign markets. The markets had been lost because of foreign tariif s;
because production costs in England were high, compared with
those of countries where the standard of living was lower; and be
cause the out-of-date methods of the industries concerned could
not be changed without great expense. There were four chief Dis->
tressed Areas: South Wales, where the coal industry was in diffi-^
culties and demand for tinplate had been reduced by the use of
aluminum, glass, carton, and plastics; West Cumberland, also a coal
area; Tyneside, where, besides the coal-mines troubles, many ship
building, engineering and iron and steel plants were lying idle; and
large parts of Scotland. The cotton area of Lancashire, though not
RECOVERY, 1935
officially classed as distressed , was also having difficulty in com
peting in Eastern markets with Japanese and Indian manufacturers.
What could be done, in an increasingly troubled world, to help
these districts to recover?
The National Government passed a Special Areas Act in 1934
the euphemistic word Special had been substituted for *Dis-
tressed > . Among its enactments was one that workers should be
transferred to more prosperous areas to the motor industries in
the Midlands and the new light industries in the south. Land-settle
ment schemes were to be tried again; waste lands was to be planted
with trees, marshes drained, and new industries set up in the Special
Areas themselves. The Government set aside 2,000,000 to finance
these schemes, and two Commissioners were appointed to carry
them out, one for Scotland and one for England and Wales. The
latter wrote a memorandum in 1935 on the first few months of his
work. He complained that he was continually held up by the un
willingness of other Government departments to co-operate; each
accused him of encroaching upon their territory. Eventually he
found so much obstruction offered that he resigned.
The work of the Commissioners had no immediately beneficial
effect, and what little improvement did occur in the Special Areas
was not due wholly to their activities. They admitted in a report
"issued in 1937 that rearmament was responsible for the expansion
of the coal, iron, steel, and shipbuilding industries. The increase in
employment, however, did not equal the increase in output. The
report also stated: It is a new thing for a Government to buy sites
and build factories, in order to induce industry to go to an area
where the percentage of unemployment is very high, yet already
in Merthyr, Sunderland, and elsewhere, a beginning is being made/
Another example of intervention by the State in what had been
regarded as the private field of business as usual, neither on a large
scale nor with notable success.
The most neglected Special Areas were in Scotland: the indus
trialized Lowlands were depressed and huge tracts in the Highlands
extremely backward. The English had remained, on the whole,
largely unaware of specifically Scottish problems, which did not
lend themselves to journalistic controversy. Industrial problems on
the Clydeside occasionally came up, but only when some drastic
action called attention to them: strikes in the shipbuilding yards,
RECOVERY, 1935 299
or the arrival in London of hunger marchers from Glasgow. Work
ers in West Fife expressed their discontent in 1935 by electing a
Communist M.P. the only one in Parliament and Glasgow be
came one of the strongest centres of Communism. The problems of
the rest of Scotland, and especially in the Highlands, were com
pletely ignored. The political world was astonished in 1935 when
the traditionally Liberal Western Isles returned a Labour member
to Parliament.
In the Highlands, agriculture and fishing were declining indus
tries, and no new ones were taking their place. Bad road and rail
way services helped to perpetuate backward conditions, nor were
the wild scenic beauties capitalized by any powerful tourist organ
ization, as in Norway and Sweden. The old deer forests and grouse
moors, which had employed numerous Highlanders as ghillies, were
now being sold, because their owners found them too expensive
to keep up. Most of this land was unfit for cultivation, and Gov
ernment schemes for settling people on it were strongly criticized.
Lady Astor ironically asked in the Commons whether the Minister
sponsoring such schemes would care to live there as a crofter him
self. In fact, almost the only employment open to most young
Highlanders was in the fighting services, The Highlands remained,
as they had been for two and a half centuries, a fertile ground for
recruiting.
New factories could not easily be established in the north of
Scotland, but the Caledonian Power Scheme of 1936 contained a
plan for producing calcium carbide by water power. This com
pound, used in the welding and cutting of metals, had so far been
imported mostly from Norway. The House of Commons rejected
the scheme in 1938 on the ground that it was not essential to the
rearmament programme. The member for Inverness led the opposi
tion to the scheme in the House, on the ground that it would
deplete the River Ness of water, to the detriment of the Inverness
sewage system and of the salmon fishery. The Inverness Town
Council supported him, declaring that tourists would be deterred
from visiting the famous and beautiful glens if there were factories
in them: the Loch Ness monster thus indirectly assisting in keeping
away new industries from the Highlands.
Many Scots gave up hope of ever getting Parliament to listen to
their grievances. A Scottish Nationalist Party had already been
300 RECOVERY, 1935
formed, under the leadership of the Duke of Montrose, to demand
a separate parliament in Edinburgh to deal with Scottish affairs. It
was largely a cultural movement and never succeeded in returning
a member to Parliament, though its candidates frequently secured
large polls. Scottish Nationalist delegations studied home rule in
Northern Ireland and the Isle of Man, and made much in their
reports of the lower rates of taxation which home rule brought.
The Labour and Liberal parties also declared themselves in favour
of some kind of devolutionary government for Scotland; but the
Scottish Nationalist movement was never widely enough supported
or militant enough to force any government to grant its wishes.
The minority demand for self-government also spread to Wales,
but Welsh home rule was not so seriously canvassed: Welsh prob
lems were hardly distinguishable from English ones and bilingual
teaching in schools and the disestablishment of the Welsh Church
had removed two principal grievances. Welsh Nationalists were
chiefly university professors and students intent on reviving Bardic
culture and only occasionally gave vent to political irritation.
Towards the close of the period, for example, some Welsh university
lecturers tried to set fire to an Air Force depot as a protest against
the desecration of beauty spots. At their trial they stood by their
Nationalist principles to the extent of refusing to plead in English.
In England a small but rowdy organization had begun to attract
public attention: this was the British Union of Fascists. Its leader
was Sir Oswald Mosley, who had been elected as Conservative
member for Harrow at the age of twenty; married Lord Curzon s
daughter; quarrelled with the party; gone over to Labour, quarrelled
with Labour; helped to found the New Party, which disintegrated.
He had now come to believe in Action of the kind that Dicta
tors practised; nevertheless, he derided the idea that he was aiming
at a personal dictatorship. If a mandate be conferred upon us by
the people at a general election, then this is a dictatorship by the
will of the people, expressing for themselves what they want.
Mosley produced no plan for solving Britain s problems, and never
secured his people s mandate . His call for Action , however, at
tracted a number of tough young men, who seemed to enjoy strut
ting about in black shirts and behaving aggressively to Communists
and to the poorer Jews. His Fascist Imperialism, and especially his
call for the Strong Hand in India won for him the temporary sup-
RECOVERY, 1935 301
port of Lord Rothermere and the Daily Matt. Rothermere admired
the apparent energy of dictators, and thought that Mosley could
infuse the same energy into the lethargic people of Britain, Other
newspapers then set themselves to expose the Blackshirts 7 deliberate
imposture on Lord Rothermere. The News Chronicle published a
letter sent by the Fascist leaders to all party branch officers. It
urged them to write to the Daily Mail in seemingly disinterested
approval of Fascism, to convince Rothermere that his support of
Mosley was popular. The Daily Mail did print several such inspired
letters, but when Rothermere realized what was happening he soon
dropped the Blackshirts. Unfortunately for so strong an anti-Semite 7
as Mosley, his wife (who retained her Socialistic convictions) was
half -Jewish. However, she died and left him free to marry in 1937,
secretly and with Hitler as his best man, a sister of the Perfect
Aryan Beauty 7 , Unity Mitf ord. Mosley was also a friend of Musso
lini s and once appeared with him on a balcony, to be saluted by an
Italian crowd.
The Blackshirts started their campaign with a meeting at Olym-
pia in June 1934, and followed it up with a rally in Hyde Park in
September. Their aggressiveness and use of knuckle-dusters against
hecklers provoked the Left to make counter-demonstrations, which
usually silenced the Blackshirt speakers. The danger that partisan
warfare might break out in the streets led Parliament to pass a
Public Order Act in 1936, which forbade the wearing of political
uniforms at public meetings. Communists did not in fact wear red
shirts, but only sang about the colour. The Act also gave the Chief
of Police the power to ban political processions likely to cause a
breach of the peace, and to place certain districts under an inter
dict. Another clause in the Act allowed the chairman of public
meetings to summon constables to take the name and address of
persons reasonably suspected to have behaved in a disorderly man
ner . The offence of using insulting words and behaviour in public
was extended from London to the rest of England, and the pen
alties for it increased.
These clauses were primarily aimed at preventing Blackshirt
disturbances, but they made the Left feel uneasy. Four other meas
ures which seemed to threaten the rights of the citizen had already
been passed, and the Left feared that the framework of a reaction
ary Fascist State was coming into existence in Britain. The Fire-
302 RECOVERY, 1935
arms Act of 1920 chiefly directed against armed bandits had
contained a clause empowering the Home Secretary to authorize
the drilling and training of private citizens. The Left feared that
this might now be used to authorize armed squads to indulge in
unofficial Communist hunting. The Emergency Powers Act of
1920 allowed the Government to proclaim a state of emergency
if essential social services were interfered with. This was an anti-
strike measure, and was followed by the Trade Disputes Act of
1927, which made illegal all strikes calculated to coerce the Gov
ernment. But what started the campaign against the infringement
of civil liberties was the Incitement to Disaffection Act of 1934,
popularly known as the Sedition Act. People feared that this Act
would introduce Russian Ogpu or German Gestapo methods into
Britain. As originally worded, it authorized police inspectors to
search any place or person suspected of a treasonable offence and
to seize anything suspected to be evidence. All that the police had
to do first was to get a search-warrant from two local Justices of
the Peace. This aroused strong protests, because local J.P.s would
scarcely refuse anything to a police inspector; and the Act was
altered so that the search-warrant had to be obtained from a High
Court Judge. The Act aimed at preventing the dissemination of
seditious literature among the armed forces, but it also rendered
liable to prosecution anyone who had such literature in his posses
sion, whether or not he had read it or tried to disseminate it.
In the light of the Sedition Act it was considered extremely
" sinister that Lord Trenchard, the Commissioner of Metropolitan
Police and a former Air Marshal the R.A.F. was suspected of
Fascist leanings should have introduced a new element into his
organization, the gentlernan-bobby . The police had formerly been
recruited from the lower-middle or working classes, and had been
officered by men who had risen from the ranks. Now young upper-
class officers were to be trained in a sort of Sandhurst and allowed
better chances of promotion than men who had been several years
in the service. On the 3ist May 1934 the Prince of Wales opened
the Metropolitan Police College at Hendon again the R.A.F. con
nection! The object of the college was to enable men selected for
their special qualifications to attain the highest police efficiency by
a course of intensive training. Thus it is estimated that at the end
of a course of fifteen months, followed by a year of actual police
RECOVERY, 1935 303
duties, a student will have acquired as much practical experience
as if he had served in the force for ten years under the present
system.* Special qualifications meant a public school education and
some knowledge of foreign languages. Students would wear the
blue uniform of a probationary inspector. They would dine at
8 p.m. and would wear dinner jackets. When off duty they would
be permitted to wear mufti. The complete course would occupy
fifteen months, three of these being holidays. Ex-Servicemen would
act as servants in the college and there would be one batman for
every six students.
The Times the next day glossed over the class-question with
these benignant phrases: The secret of the unique reputation en
joyed by the police in England is the mutual understanding be
tween the citizen in uniform and the citizen in mufti. That under
standing the new course of training is well calculated to preserve,
because it will ensure that, while the policeman s professional skill
is all his own, the life he lives and the ideals he cherishes will be
those of the people from whose ranks he comes. 7
The controversy raised by the Sedition Act led to the formation
of a National Council for Civil Liberties, with E. M. Forster as
President. The Council intended to preserve the citizen s rights by
means of protests and agitation. One of the first activities it under
took was the defence of authors rights. It protested, for instance,
against the prosecution of James Hanley and his publishers on
account of the homosexual passages in his book Boy. A policeman
in Bury had happened to borrow a copy of this book from his local
public library three years after it had been published. He judged
it obscene and secured a conviction. The court imposed heavy fines
upon the author and the publishers, and warned them that they
were liable to prosecution for every copy of the book in circula
tion. The National Council for Civil Liberties did not manage to
get Hanley and his publishers reimbursed, nor did it achieve any
notable alteration in the laws. Like so many similar committees in
the Thirties, however, its petty protests at least served as a guide to
Parliament upon public feeling.
However, 1934 was a quiet sort of year. The worst of the De
pression was over, and the series of international crises had scarcely
begun. The country was ready for some kind of national celebra
tion, which would assure people that existing political troubles
304 RECOVERY, 1935
were of no great importance. The first public ceremony to meet
this need was the wedding of the King s fourth son, Prince George,
and Princess Marina of Greece. Their engagement was announced
in September 1934 the newspapers describing it as the culmina
tion of a holiday romance in Slovenia. Pictures and genealogies
of all Princess Marina s relatives were published, and much pleasant
speculation was raised: what royal dukedom would Prince George
be given? where would he and his bride live? what kind of wed
ding-gown would she wear? Prince George, who became the Duke
of Kent, was, like the Prince of Wales, generally offered by the
Press as a symbol of ardent youth, although he was over thirty.
The wedding took place in December at Westminster Abbey with
the usual State pageantry. The illustrated weeklies issued special
numbers, with coloured photographs and coloured drawings of the
wedding ceremony, intended to be preserved as valuable memen
toes. It was a great many years since the Royal Family had been
enriched by so stylish a bride. The shopping world celebrated the
occasion by naming fashions in hats, dresses, shoes, and stockings
after Princess Marina.
The splendours of the Kent wedding were far outdone by those
of the Silver Jubilee in the following year. Already in 1934 it began
to be suggested that a celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary
of King George V s accession to the throne might be a fitting way
of rejoicing that the Depression was over. The King in a speech
broadcast from Sandringham on Christmas Day 1934, spoke of the
happily surmounted trials of his reign: May I add very simply and
sincerely that if I may be regarded as in some true sense the head
of this great and widespread family, sharing its life and sustained
by its affection, this will be a full reward for the long and some
times anxious labours of my reign of well-nigh five-and-twenty
years. As I sit in my own home I am thinking of the great multi
tudes who are listening to my voice, whether they be in British
homes or far-off regions of the world. For you all, especially for
your children, I wish a happy Christmas. 5 The King had been by
no means popular when he first came to the throne. Many rumours
had been current about his supposed secret marriage as a young
man to an Admiral s daughter he volunteered to go into the
witness-box in the Mylius libel case to deny this and about his
intemperance. But insensibly his homely virtues and loyalty to the
RECOVERY, 1935 305
Coronation oath had endeared him to the British public; until at the
time of his illness in the winter of 1928-9, when he nearly died of
pneumonia, a sincere national anxiety revealed how much he meant
even to people who had laughed at him for a dullard or detested
him as a parasite . These fireside talks at Christmas, which he had
now been giving for several years, stirred truly loyal sentiments.
The country was quite willing to jubilate.
It is said that the Jubilee celebrations caused the King himself
some misgiving; he feared that there was still enough unemploy
ment and poverty about to make them a fiasco. As Jubilee Day
approached, however, committees were spontaneously formed al
most everywhere to organize local fetes and hang out banners in
the streets. The Office of Works arranged for London s historic
buildings the Houses of Parliament, Buckingham Palace, and St.
Paul s to be floodlit at night and covered with flowers. Local
authorities put up elaborate decorations on lamp-posts, tram stand
ards, and public buildings, and almost every household hung up
its own flags and coloured streamers. (Only two houses in England
defiantly flew the old republican colours, which had been used in
the days of the Chartists: red, white, and green in horizontal
stripes.) East End districts in London were enthusiastic and frank.
A popular banner read: Lousy but Loyal 7 . In spite of some growl
ing from the far Left, everyone decided to treat the Jubilee as a
royal and popular fete an extension of the Cavalcade success
not as a celebration staged by the National Government.
Jubilee Day was on May 6th. The Royal Family drove in State
procession to St. Paul s to attend a Thanksgiving Service. They
were accompanied by all the Ministers of the Crown and the repre
sentatives of foreign powers. The weather was perfect fortu
nately for the crowds, who had waited all night along the route and
slept on the pavements, wrapped up in newspapers. London was
crammed with visitors from abroad and from the provinces many
of them amused Londoners by their fear of such novelties as escala
tors. Hotels and rooms from which to view the procession had been
booked up long in advance. But the atmosphere was so unusually
gay that no one complained of having nowhere to spend the night.
In the evening of the 6th, enormous crowds gathered outside Buck
ingham Palace and cheered the King, until he came out with the
Royal Family on to the balcony to acknowledge their greeting. He
RECOVERY, 1935
is reported to have said: *I can t understand it. I m really quite an
ordinary sort of chap. But it was, indeed, a festival for every
ordinary good sort of chap, who had come through twenty-five
difficult years and who was still full of hope for the future. That
night ordinary chaps packed Trafalgar Square and Piccadilly Cir
cus, singing the songs of the Great War: Tipperary , There s a
Long Long Trail , and Keep the Home Fires Burning . Although
a large part of the crowd was made up of young people, more
recent songs were not sung none of the Ain t it Grand to be
Blooming-well Dead! which had helped people to endure the De
pression. Piccadilly itself resembled a drive in a public park on
Sunday afternoon: crowds strolled excitedly up and down and
motor traffic could scarcely get through. Even the intelligentsia
who had felt dismally that this was really going to be a shame-
making show were surprised and touched by the sincere and un
affected behaviour of the crowds.
The name Jubilee was being given to every novelty of the day,
from a new sort of chocolate stick to the latest baby in the Ape
House at the Zoo. The Post Office broke the conservative traditions
of English philately by bringing out an issue of Jubilee stamps.
The Kong happened to be one of the keenest philatelists in England
and about this time knighted the keeper of his collections. There
were also Jubilee dresses, Jubilee hats, and even Jubilee finger-nails
these were painted on each index finger in red, white, and blue
with a small gold crown stenciled on top. The Royal School of
Needlework designed a Jubilee sampler that everyone could make,
decorated with pictures of guns, palaces and yachts, and little verses
such as:
Trince of sportsmen, brilliant shot,
But happiest aboard his yacht.
Jubilee celebrations continued mildly for several weeks after the
memorable May 6th. Meanwhile, the National Government re
shuffled itself before taking advantage of the popular enthusiasm
to hold a General Election in the autumn. Ramsay MacDonald was
still Prime Minister, but it was clear that he was becoming unfit for
his duties. His public speeches were growing vaguer and vaguer.
At first only Opposition newspapers noticed this: the News
Chronicle , for instance, laughed at a speech delivered early in 1934
RECOVERY, 1935 307
at Leeds Town Hall as part of the National Government propa
ganda campaign. In it MacDonald spoke of coming down to facts
and facing them , of the sanctity of the firesides of the poor , and
of the necessity of keeping in touch not only with progressive but
also with retrograding movements in our advance*. He had a fatal
facility for confused metaphors: a well-known one was, *Ah, my
friends, how easy it would be to listen to the milk of human kind
ness. By 1935 many newspapers made cynical comments on re
ported statements of his, such as: Society goes on and on and on.
It is the same with ideas. In February The Times criticized him for
lack of cohesion, lack of decision, and lack of calm when he had
excused himself in the House for not being able to answer a ques
tion about the Means Test. He explained that he had not been able
to phone through to the right department to ask for information.
In April, the Observer was significantly denying that he would
retire before the Jubilee nobody had yet officially suggested that
he would. The Jubilee was in fact chosen as the right moment for
him to be translated to the lesser dignity of Lord President of the
Council. Baldwin then again became Prime Minister.
A General Election, though not due until the following year,
was held in November 1935, because the National Government
thought that the Jubilee had for a time quenched party feeling in
loyalty and patriotism. They relied on Jubilee sentiment to put
them back into power. The election, however, was by no means a
quiet one. National Labour candidates were given a particularly
rough time. Malcolm MacDonald was shouted down as a baby-,
starver* because of the Means Test; Ramsay MacDonald could
scarcely get a hearing at his constituency of Seaham; J. H. Thomas
was driven to anger at one of his meetings, and called his audience
cowards for not listening to the voice of truth ; his son Leslie
Thomas, who was a candidate for Leek, was tripped up on his way
out of a meeting and held down on the pavement. Nor did Conr
servative candidates have an easy time: a stone was thrown through
the glass roof of the building in which Neville Chamberlain was
speaking at Birmingham; Walter Elliot at Glasgow was attacked
by rowdies and had to fight his way to the platform. Sir Austen
Chamberlain declared indignantly at Birmingham, where demon
strators continually interrupted him: You begin to see how a
Socialist Government would treat you free speech for them, but
J08 RECOVERY, 1935
for no one else. 5 And Sir John Simon, the National Liberal leader,
quavered out at Barnsley: I am facing the music, but you will not
give me a chance.
The result of the election strengthened the case for proportional
representation in Parliamentary constituencies. The Conservatives
polled about ten million votes and the Socialists about eight million,
yet the Conservatives held 238 seats and the Socialists only 151.
The parliamentary strength of the National Liberal and National
Labour parties was reduced, and that of the Opposition Liberals
halved. In all, Opposition Labour had gained 92 seats, and the Con
servatives lost 77. Ramsay MacDonald was defeated at Seaham by
twenty thousand votes; but in the following year was smuggled
into Parliament again as member for the Scottish Universities. He
did not retire finally until 1937.
The King died at Sandringham in the New Year of 1936. Two
days before, while public prayers were being offered for his recov
ery, the death of Rudyard Kipling had been announced. Someone
wrote sentimentally to the Daily Telegraph on this coincidence that
the King has sent his Trumpeter ahead . The Kong s death took
place at 11.55 on th e night of January 2oth after a succession of
grave bulletins on the radio, the last of which at 9.25 in the golden
voice of the chief announcer, Stuart Hibberd, told the country that
c the King s life is moving peacefully towards its close . The rumour
ran about that the death had taken place some hours before, but
that the announcement had been kept back until the last five min
utes of the day to forestall the possible proclamation of a Stuart
pretender before arrangements had been completed to proclaim the
due accession to the throne of the Prince of Wales. At the death of
Edward VII an embarrassing claim had been posted at the Palace
Gates on behalf of Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria.
King George was sincerely mourned. The papers appeared with
heavy black lines on the day of his death and on that of his funeral.
All broadcasting programmes were cancelled and theatres and
cinemas closed. On January 23rd the body was brought to London,
where it lay in state at Westminster Hall, crowds filing past it
every day, often at the rate of fifteen thousand an hour. The
funeral was to take place on Tuesday the 28th, and on the night
before, at midnight, the new King himself and his three brothers
mounted guard for half an hour over their father s coffin. A day
RECOVERY, 1935 309
of National Mourning followed. The streets of London were spar--"
ingly but harmoniously draped in purple. The crowd, a large part
of which had waited all night on the pavement, made quite a jolly
affair of the funeral with lunch-baskets and camp-stools. Where s
George?" someone cried gaily in Trafalgar Square; for the cortege
from Westminster to Paddington Station, where it was to take
train for the interment at St. George s Chapel, Windsor Castle, had
failed to appear on rime. The cry was taken up and a great roar of
laughter arose. Where s George? was a popular advertising catch
word of Lyons* restaurants. Yet there was no disrespect in the
laughter. c He was a good little man and we ll miss him. The new
King, Edward VIII, walked behind the coffin with five other kings,
and the representatives of numerous states, including Nazi Ger
many. According to the Daily Worker, General Goering had
wished to come himself, but was warned by the Foreign Office
that his personal safety could not be guaranteed in view of the hos
tility of Jewish refugees and others; Baron von Neurath and some
generals came instead. The U.S.S.R. sent Marshal Tukachevsky
and his wife. There were seven thousand casualties in die funeral
crowds.
Two strange incidents were headlined in the American Press:
the first that the small golden cross fell off the Crown as it was
being carried on a cushion at the funeral service. Omen or accident?
The second was reported in Britain only by the Daily Worker, on
January 30th: It appears that King Carol, who does not often get
among the lights of London, woke up on funeral morning feeling
not too well. Resourceful attaches succeeded in securing the serv
ices of an able and energetic masseur of Rumanian origin, who
worked hard on the King. Thinking that a last-minute work-over
might do good, the masseur accompanied the King in his car the
lateness of Carol had already caused considerable confusion around
Westminster Hall. The masseur, bewildered by marching troops,
lost his head and, thinking escape impossible, lined np with the lesser
diplomats, generals, and foreign attaches, and marched a consider
able distance, clad in ordinary civilian clothes hastily put on over
his masseur s dress and an ordinary felt hat on his head. Yesterday
people tried to spot the masseur in newspaper pictures of the
parade. Many of them pounced on the picture of a strange-looking
man in white trousers and a brown trilby hat who was described
3io RECOVERY, 1935
vaguely in the newspapers as "a representative of Transylvania".
Since there was no mention of such a person in the official list, many
people thought that he really was the masseur. The next day the
Daily Worker reported: Yesterday s news about Carol created an
uproarious sensation in London. There are further disclosures: the
name of the "Marching Masseur" is Stoebs, and he is in fact the
sturdy gentleman whose picture millions of people saw in the official
photographs. He has been erroneously described as a Rumanian
officer, a Balkan V.C., and a representative of Transylvania. At the
moment everyone concerned is busily engaged in issuing denials of
everything/
There was, in fact, nothing in this exciting story. The supposed
masseur was a member of the Rumanian delegation, a schoolmaster
who had earned a V.C. in the war.
Thousands of schoolchildren were encouraged to send messages
of sympathy to Queen Mary. Condolences came in from all over
the world. The British public was touched to read messages from
Nigerian chiefs and from the Tashi Lama of Tibet, where the
monasteries spent the day in prayer. A graceful elegy by Edmund
Blunden appeared in The Times, and John Masefield, the Poet
Laureate, cabled a sonnet from Los Angeles, where he was staying.
The first eight lines summed up the conventional Conservative
theme of disaster overcome and Revolution averted:
This man was King in England s direst need.
In the black-battled years when hope was gone
His courage was a flag men rallied on.
His steadfast spirit showed him King indeed.
And when the war was ended, when the thought
Of revolution took its hideous place,
His courage and his kindness and his grace
Scattered, or charmed, its ministers to naught.
The laurel had greatly sobered Masefield. It was hard to believe
that this was the same poet of whom Max Beerbohm had once
written:
C A swear-word in a rustic slum
A simple swear-word is to some,
To Masefield, something more. 1
RECOVERY, 1935 311
The new King was immensely popular, and the excitement at
his accession outweighed grief for the death of his predecessor, *He
won t stand no nonsense from Baldwin/ it was prophesied in the
pubs. And what a novelty in British history, a bachelor King! The
first since George III, and he had got married soon afterwards.
That was 1760. *He ll have to marry now. What s the betting it
won t be a nice English girl for a change? He can do as he pleases
at last/ Every millgirl dreamed of herself as the Cinderella of this
exciting drama.
The select Press photographed him sitting pen in hand, and a
keen intent look on his face, in a severely furnished study.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The Days of Non-intervention
An international crisis was expected in 1935 when a plebiscite was
to be held in the Saar district, where the French had been working
the coalfields since 1919 as a means of exacting reparations. But the
plebiscite passed off peacefully under the supervision of the League
of Nations and of British, French, and Italian troops: the choice for
the Saarlanders was between returning to Germany, remaining
under a League mandate, or attaching themselves to France. Well
coaxed and threatened by the Nazis, they voted overwhelmingly
in favour of return to Germany. Already in 1934 the Germans had
reintroduced conscription without drawing more than a mild pro
test from the other European powers. This and the Saar plebiscite
were the first Nazi victories in international affairs. Europe took
them quietly, for most politicians had long since abandoned the
pretence of pinning Germany down to the letter of the Versailles
Treaty. They were willing now to make gentlemen s agreements ,
conceding some of the German claims. But the Germans remem
bered that they had signed the Versailles Treaty under duress; the
continuance of the British blockade for six months after the Armis
tice and the quartering of French colonial troops on their soil were
memories that seemed to acquit them of all duty to act as gentle
men in the Franco-British sense.
^ A crisis did arise in 1935: not from German but from Italian
action. It began with Italian provocation of the Abyssinians on the
undelimited frontier between Abyssinia and Italian Somaliland;
both Governments lodged protests at Geneva. The League set
up its usual Commission to examine the problem. It seemed at first
as though the Italians might not make war, if given a few conces
sions. When Pierre Laval, the French Prime Minister, had cordial
talks with Mussolini in January 1935 the British Left Press inter-
3 12
THE DAYS OF NON-INTERVENTION 313
preted them as a sinister move to dismember Abyssink. (The Negus
of Abyssinia was a popular figure among British newspaper readers:
his barbaric Christian Coronation festivities in 1930, to which the
Duke of Gloucester had gone as King George s representative, had
enlivened the news for days.) The affair simmered for some
months, rumours occasionally coming through of Italian military
preparations. The Abyssinians again protested to the League in x
April 1935, this time against the recruitment of labourers in Egypt
to work on military roads in the Italian East African colonies. The
Italians, though they had themselves originally sponsored Abys
sinia s candidacy for League membership, then announced that
these uncivilized blackamoors had no right to chop logic with the
new-born Roman Empire.
Opinion in England was decidedly pro- Abyssinian, though three
leading newspapers, the Morning Post, the Daily Mail, and the
Observer, supported the Italian case from the start. Moreover, a
Peace Ballot had been held that year, and out of eleven and a half
million voters, ten and a half million declared their faith in the
League of Nations, and in the use of non-military sanctions against
aggressor nations. But a large majority also favoured disarmament,
and so it seemed obvious that the British people was not prepared
for war with Italy. Besides, the heads of the Fighting Forces were
uneasy. The Fleet was in fine condition, but the Italians had a
powerful air force, and experts had been misled, by the recent re
port of how Dutch airmen had quelled a mutiny on an old battle-/
ship, into believing that a battle fleet was "cold meat to dive-
bombers especially to the Suicide Legion of Italian airmen. More
over, the Royal Air Force was far inferior in numbers and modern
ity of aircraft to the Italian. This feeling of uneasiness filtered down
to the masses. The question was: how far would die sanctions
policy be carried if the Italians did invade Abyssinia? The French
and British jointly held the key to the strategic situation by their
control of the Suez Canal: but had no intention of turning it in
the lock. For there was a canny reckoning in French and British
Government circles that it would be no bad thing to let the Italians
have a try at Abyssinia. If they succeeded, they would be kept
busy for years trying to colonize that hopeless country; if they
failed, they would be weaker still.
By September, Italian troops were sailing for East Africa, the
314 THE DAYS OF NON-INTERVENTION
Italian delegation had walked out of the League, and the Committee
of Five, which was dealing with the Abyssinian dispute, had reached
a deadlock. Early in October Mussolini declared that Italy had been
provoked , and that the time had come . On October 3rd Italian
troops went into action and on October 6th they captured the town
of Adowa. Since the Italians had now taken revenge for the humil
iating defeat inflicted on them by the Abyssinians at Adowa in the
Nineties, it was felt that a compromise might be reached. A plan
drawn up by Sir Samuel Hoare, the Foreign Secretary, and Pierre
Laval, for France, offered Italy territorial and economic conces
sions which would have virtually turned Abyssinia into an Italian
protectorate. But before the plan had been officially approved by
any government, news of it reached the Press and raised an out
burst of indignation in both Britain and France: the Abyssinians
were being let down, aggression was being condoned, League prin-
"ciples wilfully betrayed. Sir Samuel Hoare, made scapegoat, was
compelled to resign.
Anthony Eden succeeded him: a popular figure young, hand
some, smartly dressed and with the reputation of being not only a
good diplomat but honourable in the best British tradition. It was
said that Stanley Baldwin regarded Eden as a sort of spiritual son.
His own son, Oliver, was a violent Left. Eden persuaded the League
Assembly to apply economic sanctions; that is, to forbid members
of the League to supply Italy with war materials. Mussolini was
thus able to whip up Italian feeling, which had not so far been par
ticularly warlike, on the rhetorical grounds that the League was
trying to starve Italy, and that only the possession of an empire in
East Africa would forestall any such attempt in the future. Yet
sanctions were never applied to oil and petrol, of which the Italians
had insufficient stocks, and nothing therefore prevented Italian
aeroplanes and tanks from coming into action against the ill-
equipped Abyssinians. Feeling in England ran still higher against
Italy. Atrocity stories were printed: the use of poison gas and the
deliberate bombing of hospitals and ambulances. There was a call
for the closing of the Suez Canal to Italian troopships. The Left in
England held protest meetings, and formed committees to organize
bazaars in aid of the Abyssinians. Even those who were aware of
the formidable effect of air-attack combined with swift thrusts by
a "mechanized army, believed that the brave Abyssinians, under
THE DAYS OF NON-INTERVENTION 315
their mediaeval Rases and motley crew of European instructors,
would keep the Italians busy for a long time to come by guerilla
warfare. This time, it was said, Mussolini had bitten off more than
he could chew. But when early in 1936 the Italians resumed their
advance, having bribed several chiefs to desert to their side, the
Abyssinian Army was unwise enough to engage them in a pitched
battle and was handsomely defeated. The Negus then left his coun
try, appealing to the remaining loyal chiefs to carry on guerilla
warfare. The Government did not venture to override public opin
ion, which expressed deep sympathy for the Emperor and his
countrymen, by recognizing the de facto Italian conquest of
Abyssinia.
The Abyssinian crisis was the first to awaken people to the
dangers of air-attack, though politicians had for some time been
issuing warnings on air-raids, and planning to increase the R.A.F.
Baldwin had said in the House in November 1932: C I think it is
well for the man in the street to realize that there is no power on
earth that can prevent him from being bombed. Whatever people
may tell him, the bomber will always get through. . . . The only
defence is in offence, which means that you have to kill women
and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save
yourselves/ At the time some newspapers and not only die Op
position ones accused Baldwin of being an alarmist, and of going
back on his election promises. He had just pledged himself to a
policy of disarmament and support of the League of Nations,
Yet some writers, even in Opposition papers, began to realize
that aggressor nations might have to be stopped by force. Vernon
Bardett, the well-known political commentator, wrote for the Ne*w$
Chromcle in 1934 that the choice before Europe was one between
order and anarchy: to prevent anarchy from supervening, aggres
sion would sometime have to be countered. Bardett wrote that he
loathed war but would be willing to fight in a war against aggres
sion. When air exercises were held over London in April 1934, the
disquieting report was made that 70 per cent of the attacking planes
reached their objectives. Baldwin made another of his calculated
frank statements: Since the days of the air/ he said, the old fron
tiers are gone. When you think of the defence of England, you no^
longer think of the chalk cliffs of Dover, you think of the Rhine.
That is where our frontier lies. This speech was criticized in the
316 THE DAYS OF NON-INTERVENTION
idtra-Conservative Press as a provocative suggestion that Germany
might be the enemy on the contrary, the Germans were sincere
workers for world peace. The Left Press declared that Capitalist
politicians were again preparing to plunge Europe into an Imperial
ist war. Soon afterwards, it was announced that the Royal Air
. Force was to be doubled, that everyone would have gas-mask drill
with firemen as instructors, and that black-outs were to be tried.
Europe was beginning to split up into two camps. Socialists talked
openly of the split as between workers and capitalists: Left and
Right. Nobody felt quite certain, however, into which camp the
National Government would go: the Government was, in fact,
busily denying that there were two different camps. Anthony Eden
made a speech at Fulham in May 1935, deploring the re-emergence
of such meaningless phrases as pro-German and pro-French : they
belonged to a past epoch, and their use was dangerous because
they might mislead foreign opinions as to the true attitude of
Britain. The British are not anti any nation in Europe, he said, but
added warningly, but we should be, we must be, anti any who
might seek by force to break the peace.
In March 1936 the Nazi Government, having seen the failure
of League action against Italy, reoccupied the demilitarized zone of
the Rhineland. Their troops marched in without even being served
out with ammunition, so certain was Hitler that France and Britain
would not intervene. Nothing in effect happened. It was not as
though Hitler had reoccupied Alsace-Lorraine, the British re
marked. Besides, the French were safe enough they had just signed
a defensive pact with the U.S.S.R. And anyhow, the Germans
weren t such bad people really, though they did have a mania about
the Jews those Olympic Winter Sports at Garmisch had been
marvellously organized, and everyone had been so hospitable and
polite.
The piling up of armaments, the politicians admitted, was a use
less and dangerous way of preserving the peace. But what else
could be done? Baldwin confessed at the Lord Mayor s Banquet
on the 9th November 1936, that rearmament made war more likely.
Everyone knew, he said, that war would degrade the life of the
people: I am prepared to devote all our efforts, whatever it may
cost in men and money, to do what is necessary, but I am conscious
all the time of the folly of all of us. Neville Chamberlain, then
THE DAYS OF NON-INTERVENTION 317
Chancellor of the Exchequer, outlined at Birmingham in January
1937 the immense programme on which work was being started for
the modernization of the country s defences. He, too, declared him
self impressed by the incredible folly of civilization which put
such burdens on the shoulders of the nation. Again in April 1937,
at a dinner of the British Bankers Association, he was complaining
of "that fear of attack from somewhere else which is almost
universal, but which may yet rest on nothing more solid than
imagination . Fewer and fewer people by 1937 were even so op
timistic as Chamberlain. Yet Lloyd George was attacking the Na
tional Government as a Council of Despair . Germany may never
attack Belgium and France/ he said. 1 tell you, as one who has
studied the whole situation, I don t think Hitler is a fool he is not
going to challenge the British Empire again by that act of folly.
The combination of rearmament with admissions of its folly
seemed to prove the pacifist case. People felt that if politicians could
not stop war, they themselves should do so, by refusing to fight. A
new pacifist organization, the Peace Pledge Union, was founded
by Canon Dick Sheppard. He was a public character: not only did
his conversational sermons, strewn with amusing yarns, bring large
congregations to his church of St. Martin s-in-the-Fields, but he
became a sort of chaplain to the B.B.C. listeners. It was he who
started the Ever-open-door in the Crypt of St. Martin s, where
the down-and-outs could take shelter for the night. He had long
been an active pacifist. When a Victory Ball was to be held in the
Albert Hall on Armistice Night, 1925, he organized protests against
it on the grounds that to commemorate a victory which had bred
so much misery and hate would be blasphemous. Instead, Canon
Sheppard held a service in the Hall, where he urged a congregation
of many thousands to dedicate themselves anew to the peace cause.
Nine years later, when the peace cause was in a bad way, he decided
to revive it. In October 1934 he circulated a letter to the Press
inviting men who would never support or sanction another war
to send him a postcard saying so. He wrote: The idea behind this
letter is not to form any fresh organization, nor to call pacifists
together to abuse those who conscientiously are not able to agree
with them, but to attempt to discover how strong the will to peace
will be/ In June 1935 a meeing was held in the Albert Hall, at
tended by seven thousand of those who had signed the pledge.
318 THE DAYS OF NON-INTERVENTION
There the Peace Pledge Union was founded, and among its original
supporters were Vera Brittain, Aldous Huxley, Rose Macaulay,
Lord Ponsonby, and Brigadier-General F. P. Crozier, a sincerely
penitent ex-fire-eater. By the autumn of 1935 eighty thousand
people had renounced war, and by 1937 one hundred and thirty
thousand.
The Union s aim was to spread pacifist feeling, and to form
* groups to study all threats to world peace: it held that a world con
ference could settle all problems by friendly discussion. One of
these problems, in the Union s opinion, was colonies. Left-Wing
people and the pacifists were usually also Left-Wing always
considered that the colonial peoples were wickedly exploited. They
seldom paused to study the particular difficulties of colonial admin
istration and the best means of dealing with them. They relied on
the vague formula of freeing the natives and allowing them to de
termine their own destiny : as when the Romans in the fifth cen
tury had withdrawn their garrison from Britain and left the pros
perous demilitarized south as a prey to the wild tribes of the north
and adventurers from overseas. The Peace Pledge Union also
opened a book shop at Ludgate Hill and founded a journal, Peace
News. Affiliated with the War Resisters International, the P.P.U.
took part in the International Peace Conference at Brussels in 1936.
Its members refused to assist in any A.R.P. exercises.
v Aldous Huxley, by now no longer a bright young satirist but an
earnest student of world aff airs, published through the Peace Pledge
Union a pamphlet, The Encyclopedia of Pacifism. In it he criticized
the Union for not going far enough; and defined pacifists as people
whose job it was to see that desirable changes took place without
discord. Communism was no remedy, because it was militaristic,
nor was Social Credit although it stressed one truth that the
present monetary system favoured certain groups of people and
so fostered discord. The possession of colonies was another source
of ill-will, because it created the unreal opposition of c Have-not to
Have powers (the Have s and the Have-not s was another
classification of Europe s two camps) . It was false to speak of the
necessity for Lebensraum (German propaganda was already begin
ning to acclimatize this word in the English language), for if scien
tific agriculture were practised there would be plenty of room and
food for everyone. Nationalism, too, was a dangerous doctrine: it
THE DAYS OF NON-INTERVENTION 319
assuaged the sense of individual inferiority by setting up the supe
riority of the totalitarian State instead. What was needed was a
decentralization of government, so that people could live at peace
in small self-governing groups.
Huxley s constructive pacifism 7 commended itself to those who
felt that conscientious objection to war was too negative a view in ,
the face of the growing menace of the totalitarian countries. Such
ideas, however, could only be put into action by political means,
and the existing political parties were enmeshed in the parliamentary
game, and too powerful to permit the foundation of new parties.
But the young, eager, and intelligent did not become disillusioned
with politics: they were attracted to the only non-parliamentary
political party the Communists. Part of the allure of Communism
lay in the sense it gave its adherents of being outside the ordinary
political game, free to criticize it and free to speculate widely on
new plans and ideas.
The Labour Party had long since ceased to be Left, and Left
activities were without the sanction of Labour Party officials. Thus,
the counter-demonstrations which met Mosley s British Union of
Fascist inarches were always staged by Communists and other
groups of the Left outside. The Communist Party and the Inde
pendent Labour Party now a very small group indeed, led by
James Maxton set up a Joint Committee in 1934 for Anti-Fascist
action. Fascism had ceased to mean merely die form of government
practised in Italy: it now covered all forms of totalitarian national
ism. As examples of Fascist aggression multiplied in the world, Left
activity caine to be more and more concerned with international
politics. The Right was accused of trying to turn German ambi
tions in the direction of the Soviet Ukraine and the Left itself found
reasons in Hitler s Mein K&mpf for thinking that this was where
they would turn. Calls for anti-Fascist action were therefore always
linked with calls for the defence of the Soviet Union, which was
represented as the workers paradise menaced by threats from the
Capitalist inferno.
The Labour Party rejected persistent calls upon it to join in any
united action either against Fascism or in favour of the Soviets. At
the time, popular fronts of all the Left groups were being formed-
in France and Spain, and the extreme Left wanted a similar front
in England. Only that way, they believed, could the National Gov-
J20 THE DAYS OF NON-INTERVENTION
eminent be defeated in an election. They talked of politics in
military terms: there was a class-struggle , a front , many battles ,
and the prophesied victory of the working class . Conservative news
papers were worried: The Times, for instance, observed that the
spirit of 1926 which produced the General Strike is showing itself
again . It will be remembered that the idealistic revolutionary spirit
among the rank and file of the fighting forces, at the conclusion of
the Great War had been successfully appeased by promises, and
broken by demobilization. It arose again as the early Twenties
brought unemployment and disillusion and the Conservative Gov
ernment of 1926 felt itself strong enough to ignore the recom
mendations of the official Samuel report on the collectivization of
mines, but had again been broken. The Conservatives had for sev
eral parliamentary generations been called The Stupid Party , not
only bitterly by its opponents but affectionately by its back
benchers. The National Government had been a stroke of political
genius a concentration of all that was lovably stupid of all three
parties into a bloc around the nucleus of the Stupid Party. All
highly gifted politicians of the two elder parties, such as Lloyd
George and Winston Churchill, the only two Members of Parlia
ment who had any talent for incisive debate, were necessarily in
"" the wilderness . The official Opposition, the Labour Party, was also
decidedly lacking in forceful speakers, and, perhaps for the first
time since the Reform Act, the ordinary common-sense view of
the intelligent man in the street carried no political weight.
Labour had certain local successes. At the London County
Council elections of 1934 its candidates gained a majority of seats
over the Conservative Municipal Reformers. This majority was held
for the rest of the period, thanks chiefly to the leadership of Her
bert Morrison, the only contemporary Labour leader whose energy
made any impression on the general public. The Labour L.C.C.
had, on the whole, a good record especially in matters of slum
clearance and rehousing. Even the unofficial Left could find little
to criticize in its actions. But the parliamentary Labour Party lacked
fire: its dependence on the T.U.C., where routine qualities were
those most prized, discouraged both brilliance and warmth of heart.
To such a condition was the party reduced that Clynes, the former
Home Secretary, could find no better way of stating Labour s case
than to quote a compliment paid by Baldwin. The Labour Party as
THE DAYS OF NON-INTERVENTION 321
a whole/ Baldwin had said, has helped to keep the flag of parlia
mentary government flying in the world in die difficult periods
through which we have passed.
The unofficial Left, exasperated by the Means Test and wage-
cuts, was out rather to tear down the parliamentary flag than keep
it flying; a new means to this end, as Ramsay MacDonald might
have put it in his failing years, was the sit-down strike. Strikes of
this kind had already been practised in Poland, the United States,
and France. The strikers took possession of the factories, mines,
and sheds where they worked, and camped in them. Employers
could not then attempt to carry on with black-leg labour but had
either to use force to eject the trespassers, risking damage to the
plant, or take immediate notice of the demands. The first strike of
this kind in Britain was made by some Monmouthshire miners as
a protest against the employment of non-Union men in the mine.
They stayed down in the workings and refused to emerge until
their demands were granted. The prospect of having men starving
in their pits alarmed the mine-owners, and they gave way.
Another form of protest was the Hunger March, which had al
ready been successfully tried three years before. The idea of unem
ployed men tramping across Britain, and relying for food and shel
ter on wayside charity, distressed the governing classes. A large
inarch was organized in January 1934. Ramsay MacDonald, then
Prime Minister, refused to see the marchers delegates, but they
were at least allowed to demonstrate without interference by the
police. A still larger march followed in 1935. Official Labour then
became impressed by this form of agitation. G R. Attlee, the Labour
leader, consented to speak from the same platform as Wai Hanning-
ton, the organizer of the National Unemployed Workers Move
ment, which sponsored the marches and which was generally con
sidered to be under Communist influence. It seemed for a moment
as though a United Front were about to be born; but when the
Communists applied to be affiliated to the Labour Party in Novem
ber that year, they were refused. Communist attention was there
after diverted from hunger-marching to denunciations of Labour.
Then came the Abyssinian and Spanish wars in rapid succession,
and Communist energy found a new outlet this time into anti-
Fascist agitations.
The Communists still remained a small party they had about
322 THE DAYS OF NON-INTERVENTION
seven thousand members at this rime but each member was an
extremely active centre of agitation, and usually adept at giving
a Marxist turn to every discussable topic. The Daily Worker had
doubled its size and greatly increased its circulation. It now in
cluded a weekly book-page and criticism of plays, films, and art
all signs of the intellectualization of the party. Nevertheless,
working-class supporters were provided for by a good deal of
horse-racing, greyhound-racing, and boxing and football news.
The Daily Worker was not the only literary means by which the
Communists spread propaganda: between 1935 and 1937 nearly a
million copies of their pamphlets and sheets were also sold. To
belong to the party meant devoting one s time and money so
whole-heartedly to the Cause and having one s political and social
history so carefully investigated that very few sympathizers with
the Communist position either desired to join the corps d? elite of
the party or would have been accepted had they offered. But the
Reds were so large a potential sales-public that Business, repre
sented by Victor Gollancz the publisher, could not afford to neglect
them.
The Left Book Club was founded in May 1936, on the model
of the American Book of the Month Club and Literary Guild ,
which had been prodigiously successful in selling general litera
ture. Left Book Club members paid a quarterly or yearly subscrip
tion and received in return one book each month, which had been
commissioned by the selection committee: this committee was
composed of Harold Laski, a Socialist professor of political theory,
John Strachey, ex-Mosley supporter, now an able exponent of
Marxist economics, and Victor Gollancz himself. It had an imme
diate success, and within a year forty thousand members had
joined and four hundred local discussion circles had been formed.
The books, bound first in yellow and then in orange paper, dealt
with every aspect of the world about which it was possible to hold
a Left opinion. Membership was maintained because, once the
books started arriving by post each month, it was as difficult to
break the habit as to stop paying instalments on an electric vacuum-
cleaner or radio-set. Often, after the first enthusiasm- had died
down, they merely served to decorate bookshelves: glanced at, but
never fully read, they were an armoury from which a weapon
could be selected for argument on any conceivable subject. The
THE DAYS OF NON-INTERVENTION 323
Marxian twist to literature soon came to recall the monkish Chris- x
tian twist of the Middle Ages. One picked up a supposedly schol
arly book on the Conquests of Genghis Khan, the World of Hesiod,
or the Court of Marie Antoinette, in ordinary brown, black, or
grey binding and before one had read a dozen pages one was aware
of the canting lay of the professional Communist.
The existence of the club embittered the controversy between
Labour and the extreme Left. Labour were invited to participate,
but refused unless its point of view was adequately represented on
the Selection Committee. The Left Book Club would not grant
this. Although, therefore, a book by Attlee was among its early
issues, the club chiefly published literature with a Marxian slant.
Labour groups tried to counter this by setting up a Labour Book
Qub and a Socialist Book Club; the Diehard Conservatives already
had their Right Book Club, and the Liberals were forming a Lib
eral Book Club. None of these rivals, however, was ever successful
enough to challenge the supremacy of the Left. There was also a
general book club: the Book Society, which never reached more
than one-fifth of the membership of its American counterpart, but
was much appreciated by overseas readers as a convenience for
keeping in touch with contemporary literature. The safe quality
of its choices can be judged from the names of some of its com
mittee members Miss Clemence Dane, Sir Hugh Walpole, Ed
mund Blunden, and George Gordon, the Merton Professor of Eng
lish Literature at Oxford.
In July 1936 the Spanish Civil War began. This three-year
struggle moved not only the Left, but all intelligent people in
Britain most strongly. The first news carne through in the third
week of July. It was reported that the progressive Spanish Govern
ment was arming the workers, while the Foreign Legion and the
insurgent regular army were marching on Madrid. It seemed at
first as if the Spanish Government would soon be overcome, espe
cially when it became known that the insurgents before they,
moved had come to an understnding with Italy and Germany.
General Franco, who had assumed command of the insurgent
armies on the accidental death of his superior Sanjurjo, boasted,
that he had four columns marching on Madrid and a fifth inside
the city, which would rise against the Government upon his ap
proach. As it happened, Franco was halted outside Madrid by the
324 THE DAYS OF NON-INTERVENTION
hastily raised People s Army of the Republican Government, the
most dependable corps of which was the International Brigade of
non-Spanish anti-Fascist volunteers. The new word fifth-column
ist soon came into the English language, being particularly applied
to certain political groups which seemed to be trying to bring
Great Britain into the Fascist camp. Suspicion was attached to the
lunches and week-end parties which Lady Astor held at her coun
try house, Cliveden, in Buckinghamshire: the Cliveden Set was
whispered to be pro-Nazi, and at the bottom of all Fifth Column
activity in England. Lady Astor herself vigorously denied these
rumours, but she could not prevent the Left Press from always
speaking of the Cliveden Set and the Fifth Column in the same
breath.
The Spanish War soon developed into a standing European
crisis. It could not be overlooked that the Italians and Germans
were helping General Franco, and that, if he were to win, Britain
and France would be threatened with an addition to the Italo-
German Axis . The Spanish Government, after appealing in vain
to the League of Nations, decided to seek help from Russia. The
Russians, who, like the Italians and Germans, wished to try their
new weapons in actual combat, sent a certain amount of help,
especially aircraft, pilots, and tanks, but not enough to compen
sate for the help that the Axis was ready to give to the other side.
The Russian intervention decided the British and French Govern
ments to remain neutral. It was feared by leading Conservatives
that, if the Republican Government won, the Communists, who
had been only a very small minority in Spain, would gain control
of the country; that this would damage Anglo-French trade in
terests in Spain and put the Left into power first in France and
then in Great Britain. The Spanish generals seemed to stand for
the Law-and-Order party, whereas the Republicans were bitterly
anti-Clerical and had killed a number of Spanish priests. The ex
perts advising the British Government believed that if Franco
won, he could be detached from his new allies by a promise of
financial assistance: the Axis powers were notoriously short of
money. The pressure brought by these elements and the natural
wish of the British and French to localize the war brought about
the Non-intervention scheme, according to which arms were not
to be exported to either side. The Germans and Italians, who Mad
THE DAYS OF NON-INTERVENTION 325
agreed to the scheme, continued to support Franco not only with
arms but with complete units of mechanized troops. The Repub
licans also continued to get outside help, but Dr. Negrin, the
Premier, who allowed himself to depend on Communist advice,
decided to buy arms only from Russia; though the Russian supplies
were scanty, inferior, and slow in coming. Spain had a large hoard
of gold in foreign banks, and armament firms in Czechoslovakia/
Belgium, France, and the United States were quite willing to sell
what he wanted, cash on delivery; they would find ways and
means.
The Axis powers naturally exaggerated the help that the Rus
sians were giving and minimized their own contribution. The
British Press made the mistake of treating a military question as
one of party politics. How sharply the Spanish question divided
opinion in England can be seen from the attitudes of the news
papers. The Morning Post, Daily Mail, Daily Sketch, and Observer
were decidedly in favour of Franco, and printed no Spanish news
that did not discredit the cause and prospects of the Reds . The
NeiDS Chronicle was similarly one-sided in its support of the Re
publicans and pressed the British Government to end the farce of
non-intervention 5 by raising the embargo on arms, even at the risk
of starting a European war. The Daily Herald printed only Repub
lican news but supported the party line of Non-intervention. The
Daily Express and Daily Mirror had Republican sympathies, but
thought that nothing should be done to provoke the Axis powers.
The Daily Telegraph and The Times set out to be impartial the
Daily Telegraph on the whole succeeding better than The Times\
The Times decided that it was unwise to print articles written by
its military correspondent, which pointed out the extreme danger
to the British Empire of a Spain friendly to the Axis powers, and
showed this as the first campaign in the coming World War. The
National Government continued to put its faith in the power of
gold to buy General Franco s friendship when the war was won.
The Blum Government in France grew very restive and the
Anglo-French Non-intervention scheme could not have been main
tained had not the British Government warned France that it
would remain neutral if French action provoked a war with Ger
many. But there were strong pro-Axis elements in France too.
Never since the French Revolution had there been a foreign
326 THE DAYS OF NON-INTERVENTION
question that so divided intelligent British opinion as this. It could
be seen in so many ways: as Fascism versus Communism, or
Totalitarianism versus Democracy, or Italy and Germany versus
England and France, or Force versus Liberty, or Rebels versus
Constitutional Government or Barbarism versus Culture, or Ca
tholicism versus Atheism, or the Upper Classes versus the Lower,
or Order versus Anarchy however one s mind worked. But,
though opinion was divided, the majority felt at least sympathy for
the Republic. It was the Communists who organized the dispatch
of the British companies of the International Brigade, before Non-
Intervention came into force, and won increasing popular favour
by so doing: of all the rallies organized by the Communist Party,
the Help-for-Spain ones were the best attended. The Labour
Party was bitterly criticized this time not only by the extreme
Left for supporting Non-Intervention. Not only Left-wingers
such as Professor Laski and Sir Stafford Cripps were attacking the
party line, but even so staid a person as Sir Charles Trevelyan,
who had been a Labour President of the Board of Education. He
said: "When the war that is looming comes and Japan and Ger
many crash in to destroy Soviet Russia, I hope the Labour Party
will have some other policy to offer than sympathy, accompanied
by bandages and cigarettes. Individual Labour leaders, however,
Clem Attlee among them, went to Republican Spain and lectured
on the situation when they returned. So did many other public
figures, including the Conservative Red Duchess of Atholl. Most
people, in fact, who either held progressive views, or simply be
lieved in decency , supported the Republican side, and many en
thusiastic young men fought for it and were killed.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The Deepening Twilight of Barbarism
Being political had meant supporting one or other of the parlia
mentary parties; but people who prided themselves on their in
telligence shrank more and more from contact with party affairs.
Like the Church, Parliament seemed to them to have fallen into
the hands of phrase-mongers and dead-heads. The two elder parties
had now, they said, enticed Labour into the grand old party game,
and it was idle to look to Westminster for reassurance as to the
future of society. The Abyssinian and Spanish Wars, which de
stroyed those easy international ideals for which the League of
Nations had stood, gave polities a wider meaning: namely,
thought for the defence of what was still sound in civilization.
Some sort 1 of non-party action seemed the readiest way out of a
cramped and stupid situation. Political convictions in this sense
were forced on well-known writers: if they continued at their
ordinary tasks of writing for entertainment or general instruction
they were derided as escapists living in ivory towers . H. G. Wells
in his The Open Conspiracy y Blueprints -for a Social Revolution,
and other writings, insisted on extra-parliamentary Radicalism as
the cure for the times. A number of the brightest writers of the
Twenties leant towards Fascism, including Wyndham Lewis, who
wrote a book in admiration of Hitler (despite Hitlef s detesta
tion of modernist art, of which Lewis was a leading exponent), and
Evelyn Waugh, who supported Italian action in Abyssinia and in
Spain; and indeed old Bernard Shaw s new political religion was
Fascist in trend. Siegfried Sassoon, Aldous Huxley, and Beverley
Nichols his sidelines were gardening, God, and the glories of the
English countryside were bitter pacifists. The Bloomsbury set
was anti-Fascist, and E. M. Forster declared that if he were younger
and bolder he would be a Communist.
3 2 7
328 THE DEEPENING TWILIGHT OF BARBARISM
It was thought incumbent on poets to get into touch with
reality . The three new poets Auden, Spender, and Day Lewis
were said to be achieving this by cultivating Left sympathies.
With them was associated the cultural and donnish Louis Mac-
Neice, who was realistic because he had written acidly descriptive
poems on bourgeois subjects, such as lawn-mowing in Hampstead
gardens. The theory of realism applied even more to imaginative
prose than to verse, though the young Left prose-writers, with
the exception of Christopher Isherwood, celebrant of life in Berlin
under the Weimar Republic, had no public as yet. An annual,
New Writing, was founded in 1936 to remedy this: it would print
socio-realistic short stories and examples of descriptive reporting
from various parts of the world. (Socio-realism seemed to provide
just that new background to life for which young people in the
Thirties were anxiously searching.) Bed-rock reality, it declared,
lay in the life of the working class; books should deal with this
from the hopeful point of view of the class struggle that was to
improve working conditions. In order to get in touch with this
sort of reality many young writers went to live or work in the
slums; but produced neither memorable literature nor historically
valuable reports of their experiences.
Socio-realism also invaded the theatre an obvious territory for
reform. The object of the new Unity Theatre was to make use
of working-class dramatic talent and produce plays with a social
istic trend or at least, plays which would appeal to intelligent
and politically conscious working-class people. The most success
ful of the purely political melodramas which it staged was Waiting
for Lefty , by an American playwright, Clifford Odets. The
action was laid at a Trade Union meeting. The members were
discussing a strike and waiting for a Communist leader to arrive.
Several interludes gave domestic aspects of the strike. As the dis
cussion at the meeting grew hotter, members of the theatre audi
ence, primed beforehand, began to cry, We want Lefty. An
atmosphere of tense expectancy was worked up, but when Lefty
did arrive, it was only to be promptly shot. This symbolized tragi
cally the suppression of working-class activities by vested interests.
Another successful play was by Herbert Hodge, a London taxi-
driver; it was called Where s that Bomb? and dealt with the
struggles of a worker poet in his attempts to save himself from
THE DEEPENING TWILIGHT OF BARBARISM 329
being sold to the symbolic figures of Money Power and British
Patriot. In the end he was victorious: he refused adamantly to
write verses to be printed on lavatory paper. This crude, sincere
morality play thrilled working-class audiences in much the same
way as the monkish Tudor morality plays, Magnificence , Every
man , and the rest, had thrilled their ancestors.
The upper-class Left poets also interested themselves in theatre
reform: plays by Auden, Spender, and MacNeice were produced
at the Westminster Theatre by a club called the Group Theatre.
The Group also used the Unity stage but the Unity players
themselves refused to produce Auden s work, considering it un
real and quite out-of -touch with working-class life. Auden s plays,
The Dog Beneath the Skin , The Ascent of F 6 , and On the
Frontier were written in collaboration with Christopher Isher-
wood. They were elaborate, farcical moralities with rambling plots
and little characterization. Their chief ingredient was incidental sa
tire in verse, usually spoken by masked choruses, directed against
decaying suburban and capital life. MacNeice s single play was of
much the same kind. Spender s bathetic Trial of a Judge made no
attempt to be amusing. It showed revolutionaries being shot and
imprisoned when Fascists come into power. The Judge represented
the average intelligent bourgeois, forced by events to support a
political party whose methods were abhorrent to him; and in the
end was imprisoned along with the revolutionaries. None of these
plays was a popular success, but they were cried up as promises of
a poetic revival in the theatre and, in the case of Auden, as
attempts to use fast-moving variety methods with a serious object.
Political literature and books of contemporary history began to
encroach upon the sales of biography and fiction. Each new poli
tical event was celebrated by a huge number of explanatory vol
umes. At the Jubilee, for instance, there was John Buchan s The
King s Grace, John Drinkwater s The King s Reign, Sir Philip
Gibb s The King s Jubilee, Arthur Bryant s King George V, and
many more. The Abyssinian War yielded Abyssinia on the Eve,
MussoliTtfs Italy, Europe s Crisis, Mussolinfs Roman Empire, and
so on. The long duration of the Spanish War permitted the pub
lication of scores of books including some by members of the
International Brigade. Most of these were written from the Left
viewpoint, with shrill warnings as to what would befall Europe
330 THE DEEPENING TWILIGHT OF BARBARISM
if Franco were allowed to win; but a few from the Right, enlarg
ing on the atrocities committed against the Catholic Church,
commending the civilizing mission of General Franco, denouncing
the Unholy Reds , Particular crises merged into the General
Crisis: this also evoked political interpretations, prophetic histories,
personal records John Gunther s Inside Europe and Madame
Tabouis s Blackmail or War, Lilian Mowrer s A Journalist s Wife,
and the like. At no time in English history had so much informa
tion on foreign affairs been available in lively popular form, nor
so many conflicting views on policy and prospects. The result was
less enlightenment than a permanent feeling of crisis, an expectancy
of worse things to come, which grew blacker and blacker until
its monstrous climax in September 1938.
The vogue for historical biography continued; it was now gen
erally written in the American snappy style popularized by W. E.
Woodward s George Washington, Phillips Russell s Benjamin
Franklin, and similar debunkments*. In October 1935 a reviewer,
asked by the Observer to notice a Gollancz biography, chose to
make an example of it. The book was Magnificent Hadrian and
Theodore Dreiser had written of it that it sets forth in detail and
with patience with beauty of words and beauty of understand
ing and sympathy a story that the whole world should know and
treasure/ This book, lavishly advertised, was typical of its class and
period. The reviewer, after first calling attention to the bibliog
raphy of two hundred mixed titles, in which three of the five
ordinary Classical historians of the period did not appear, con
tented himself with quotation and dry comment:
c "In A.D. 122 Hadrian entered Britain, the nearest of the Tin
Isles, then the abode of blue-painted savages. ... He watched
the building of the Wall. He saw the rubble core being mixed
with mortar and then faced with regular blocks of stone eight-
and-a-half by ten-and-eleven-twelfths by twenty inches."
The quickest way to criticize this passage is to rewrite it cor
rectly:
*A.D. 120 is the accepted date of Hadrian s visit of inspection
to Britain [or insert reasons for preferring A.D. 121 or 122], which
had been a Roman province for seventy-four years. In Caledonia,
to the North, lived certain wild tribes whose raids into civilized
Britain Trajan hoped to restrain by a fortified wall of stone-faced
THE DEEPENING TWILIGHT OF BARBARISM 331
rubble [never mind the eleven-twelfths, etc., but say from where
the Wall started, and where it ended], held by a standing garrison.
The Caledonians still tattooed themselves, a practice that the
Britains had abandoned since becoming civilized. Tin, for which
Britain had been known in early times, was no longer mined. [Here
state the geographical problems raised by Greek and Latin refer
ences to the Tin Islands, which were probably a group of islands
off the Galician coast, possibly the SciUy Islands, but certainly not
Britain and Ireland.]
Another quotation:
* "Lusius Quietus was a rampageous gentleman from Maure-
tania, country of Othello. During Trajan s Mesopotamian cam
paign he had led his cavalry."
The quickest way to criticize this is to rewrite it soberly:
Quintus Lusius Quietus was an independent Moorish chief,
from a part of Mauretania not included in the Roman province,
whose services to the Romans as a cavalry leader in Mesopotamia
and elsewhere, under Trajan, recall those rendered by Othello,
also a Moor, to the Venetians, in Cyprus and elsewhere. Spartianus
represents him as hot-tempered and impulsive [If Spartianus does*]
Another quotation:
* "Quietus s eyes showed their whites when he heard of that
appointment, his black brows and heavy lips took on a fiery, sullen
gloom."
The quickest way to criticize this is to rewrite it honestly:
Quietus may have felt resentment, but he is not known to have
expressed any/
The Observer had the integrity to print the notice in full, but
the reviewer was never again offered another such commission:
business was business.
The Press was modelling itself more closely than ever on Amer
ican lines: headlines shorter, news curter. The Daily Mirror imi
tated the American tabloids : it now consisted chiefly of photo
graphs, bold headlines and sub-headlines, with only a small, brief
core of news in column-form. The highly intelligent presentation
of contemporary affairs which sold the American weekly Time to
half a million readers was emulated in England by Cavalcade and
News Review they even exactly copied Time s red and white
cover. But neither journal had the financial or journalistic resources
332 C THE DEEPENING TWILIGHT OF BARBARISM
to make a Time of itself nor an editor of the quality of Time s
Luce, and the racy American manner could not be copied with
out strain and absurdity. The sophisticated humour of the New
Yorker was also imitated by a new weekly Night and Day, but
the British public for this sort of writing was too small to sustain
it long, and an unfortunate libel on little Shirley Temple s sex-
appeal sank it suddenly. Even Punch learned the trick of stream
lining its humour, but used this with restraint: for Punchy priding
itself on being a national institution, knew native English humour
to be as elaborate as it was leisurely. Daily and Sunday columnists
adopted contemporary American methods without qualms. Wil
liam Hickey s column in the Daily Express These Names Make
News (a tide also borrowed from Time), was composed of snappy
notes on anybody prominent in any walk of life: the scope of
gossip was extended far beyond the old confines of Mayfair parties
to deal indiscriminately with social, intellectual, artistic, political,
and business topics*
At the same time there was a marked rise in the standard of
advertisement copy . Commercial firms no longer assumed their
public to be wholly brainless and soulless. Gas companies adver
tised their stoves, fires, geysers, and refrigerators in short, clear
sentences stressing the advantages that the friendly, Puck-like
figure of Mr. Therm could bestow on the householder; Shell and
Guinness used the brief, witty or humorous advertisement; radio
manufacturers gave frank, man-to-man talks on the qualities of
their sets; and most large stores had learned that the fewer and
clearer the illustrations used in their catalogues the more likely
was the eye to be caught.
Depression had driven many of the Hollywood film companies
into liquidation. The industry was then rationalized by new di
rectors, muddle and waste curtailed, and an attempt made to make
firms intelligent enough to attract an increasingly critical public.
Stars now had to have more than mere sex-appeal: they had to
work even harder than stage stars, and in return demanded reason
ably sensible scripts. The old low-brow themes the office-boy
who became the power-boss, the shop-girl who met her Prince
Charming at the glove-counter, were little used. Realistic crime
dramas, usually with a newspaper-office setting, witty socialite
comedies, haywire fantasies, historical romances with some at-
THE DEEPENING TWILIGHT OF BARBARISM 333
tempt at historical verisimilitude, were added to the song and dance
spectacles. The greatest American film success of 1936 in Britain
was the American Mr. Deeds Goes to Town , with Gary Cooper,
the story of a young man who suddenly became a millionaire, and
of the misfortunes that befell him when he tried to use his money
for the public good. In 1935 Chaplin produced "Modern Times ,
giving the pathetic and humourous side of the little man s life
under mechanization. These successes were followed by Dead
End and Winterset both stories set in the poverty of the New
York slums, showing how young men were driven to crime. These
films were not social tracts, but reflected the anxieties and discon
tents of the time without ceasing to be pleasantly dramatic enter
tainment. Sound was no longer an obstacle to the easy British
acceptance of American films. Technical research had improved
the reproduction of speech, and Hollywood was employing actors
whose accents would not offend British ears and thus spoil a rich
market.
British films, meanwhile, were making a great effort to stage a
world come-back. It was still believed that they could do so if
only they were given time; though they had already been given
time, and money, and flattery. British studios were as well equipped
as most, and to improve them further stars and technicians were
imported from Hollywood. Yet there was only one popularly
successful producer in Britain: Alexander Korda, a Hungarian.
In 1935 he produced The Private Life of Henry VIIP with
Charles Laughton: the first British film to score a success in the
United States as well as in Great Britain. He gained powerful
financial backing from the Prudential Insurance Company and fol
lowed Henry VIIF with further historical films, Catherine the
Great , The Life of Rembrandt also starring Charles Laughton
and with The Ghost Goes West , a comedy directed by the
Frenchman, Rene Clair. Glair s Sous les Toits de Paris and Le
Million were two of the most popular films of the time at the
different cinemas, most of them in the London West End, where
foreign and experimental work and revivals were shown. But the
traditional deadness of British studios dispirited Clair; The Ghost
Goes West was flat, and none of Korda s later films, though work
manlike enough, managed to hold the market which Henry VIH
had opened.
334 THE DEEPENING TWILIGHT OF BARBARISM
The best individual achievement of British film-producers was
in documentary work. The Government in 1936 had already spon
sored forty short films by the General Post Office Film Unit and
twenty by commercial companies, which illustrated departmental
and industrial conditions. The Admiralty, the Air Ministry, and
the War Office also separately sponsored feature-films, in which
the work done in factories, trains, ships, and aircraft at home and
in the Empire was presented directly and skilfully. Producers had
learned from Russian film-methods how everyday life could be
made interesting on the screen without fictitious drama or wise
cracking comment. The Post Office Unit was run by two of the
innovators of documentary films John Grierson and Alberto
Cavalcanti. Grierson used commentaries as part of the pattern of
his films, explaining only where explanation was necessary, as in
Night Mail , instead of running on in semi-facetious showman s
patter. One of the Unit s most successful productions was Caval-
canti s North Sea , in 1938, which dealt with Aberdeen fishermen.
Cavalcanti here improved on Grierson s methods by putting over
his information entirely by dialogue without the help of commen
tary. Its popularity extended far outside Britain: at one time it
was showing in twenty-five Paris cinemas.
The British, however, did not apply their documentary intelli
gence to the making of news-films in the style of March of Time .
March of Time , at first a radio feature, got behind day-to-day
news and gave a perspective to events by tracing the causes which
brought them about. It carried into the cinema Time s tradition of
free, lively comment on world affairs. A March of Time film did
not show, like ordinary news reels, a series of unrelated incidents,
such as the launching of a ship, the opening of a bridge, a parade
of soldiers. It treated one subject at a time in a connected way:
the story of cancer research, the health of Britain, football pools,
the payment of tithes, political problems in the Mediterranean, in
the Far East, and inside Nazi Germany. In this way it gave real
information and a point of view upon current problems.
Radio documentary, in the form of feature programmes , had
been developing since the earliest days of the B.B.C. There was
great excitement in the Twenties when, by scraping a fiddle, a
B.B.C. naturalist persuaded a nightingale in the Surrey woods to
sing into the microphone for the pleasure of millions of listeners.
THE DEEPENING TWILIGHT OF BARBARISM 335
The technique of using sound to convey impression was slowly
perfected. The B.B.G s mewing seagull that performed whenever
a marine landscape was needed became something of a joke, but
a good deal was done towards a practical bringing the world to
the fireside* by accurate recording of British and foreign noises.
The feature programme was now cried up as the purest expres
sion and worthiest object of the whole broadcasting business *a
means of unifying the thought and understanding of the nation,
showing the one half not only how the other half lived but what
it meant*.
A new element introduced into films in the Thirties was colour.
It was used, however, much as sound was at first a lot of it and
as strident as possible. Black-and-white films had slowly built up
an expressive technique of shapes, shadows and shades, not to be
found in colour films; indeed, so much colour was used that shapes
were violently accentuated or completely obliterated, and suc
cessive images left only a confused impression.
The only really successful colour films at this time were car- t
toons, and especially the Silly Symphonies of Walt Disney. Dis
ney s black-and-white Mickey Mouse cartoons had been popular
with the public for some years. His Silly Symphonies proved even
more popular. Their success was due partly to the technical
reason that the colour photography of animated cartoons was a
ample affair, compared with that of natural scenery; partly to
Disney s sense of composition, design and characterization. The
use of Mendelssohn s Spring Song to illustrate a comically exub
erant world of bursting flowers, hopping frogs, hunting herons,
was shocking at first, but the ballet-effects were graceful, and the
synchronization of music and colour-movement perfect. He made
such simple things as clouds of gnats, whirling storms, schools of
fish, hold the eye. With his animal characters Mickey Mouse,
Pluto the Hound, Donald Duck, the Three Little Pigs, and the Big
Bad Wolf he and his four hundred technicians created a fabulous
world of childish imagery. Some Symphonies were founded on
traditional fables the Tortoise and the Hare, the Grasshopper and
the Ants; others, particularly those in which the irritable hero
Donald Duck featured, relied on the cruel misfortunes of slapstick
comedy. Their appeal was to the eye, the ear, and the sense of
comedy; no other popular films at die time succeeded so well in
336 THE DEEPENING TWILIGHT OF BARBARISM
satisfying all these three senses. Children loved them, yet were
secretly terrified by them, as their parents had been by the two
Grimms fairy stories and Shockheaded Peter.
There was no remarkable new developments in the commercial
theatre of the Thirties. There were still crime dramas, such as
Night Must Fall by the young Welsh actor and playwright,
Emlyn Williams; still Cochran revues with a very high standard
of dancing and Jessie Matthews as the acknowledged tops ; still
Coward s satirical wit less flamboyantly clever and more genu
inely sentimental in Conversation Piece and Tonight at 8.30 .
Also dramas based on the problems of youth, as The Wind and
the Rain , and romantic Bohemian plays, such as Escape Me
Never , Margaret Kennedy s sequel to The Constant Nymph ,
which enjoyed a long run, chiefly because of the acting of the
refugee actress, Elisabeth Bergner. J. B. Priestley had also turned
to the stage and was attempting to enliven suburban interior
scenes by experimenting with their time-sequence. And James
Bridie, a Scottish doctor, wrote sinister character-studies, and
modernized Bible stories. The nearest that the stage came to socio-
realism was Sean O Casey s unmoralistic studies of low Irish life,
and Walter Greenwood s Love on the Dole , which dealt humor
ously but pathetically with the life of the unemployed the
heroine saved herself and her family from starvation by becoming
a bookmaker s mistress. Greenwood, who had published Love on
the Dole as a novel in 1933, was one of the few socio-realists who
wrote of distressed area conditions from unsought and appalling
personal experience. He was from Salford, had only a council-
school education, and wrote the book in the very circumstances
described in it: it did not ramble, however, in the ordinary prole
tarian style but showed a disciplined literary sense.
British plays were generally well acted, often neatly written,
sometimes amusing, seldom memorable. The most likely to last,
T. E. Lawrence pronounced, were Coward s perfectly timed
comedies Private Lives , 1930, was a good example. Films and
the radio were now the chief forms of entertainment. They at
tracted more talent and gave rise to more enthusiasm and to more
controversy than plays. There was, however, an enormous in
crease of amateur acting in the suburbs of the big cities. Since
1918 the number of provincial theatres had decreased and the
THE DEEPENING TWILIGHT OF BARBARISM 337
provincial touring system had been curtailed. For those who were
not satisfied with mass cinema-going, amateur acting was a solu
tion. It was a sociable, entertaining pastime. In 1936 there were
nearly forty thousand amateur dramatic societies, and nearly one
million amateur actors in Britain. About four thousand societies
from every part of the country were affiliated to the British
Drama League, founded in 1919 to promote a right relation be
tween drama and the life of the community . The League organ
ized an annual festival competition, with marks awarded to com
panies for acting, setting, costumes, and choice of play. The final
stage of the competition was held in London, where the most suc
cessful companies had the thrill of appearing in a West End theatre.
Even villages were taking up amateur acting; encouraged by the
Women s Institutes, which held competitions of their own. The
Churches had tacitly withdrawn their objections to the stage, and
in many parishes the vicar himself organized amateur theatricals.
One form of entertainment in the Thirties which rapidly ex-,
tended its popularity from highbrows downwards was ballet.
Colonel de Basil s Russian Ballet first appeared at Covent Garden
in 1934 with Leonide Massine as choreographer. De Basil had
gathered his company at Monte Carlo, where they trained and
performed for several years: it included several old hands from
Diaghileff days and many young dancers from the ballet-schools
of Paris. They performed the old Diaghileff ballets and a number
of new ones: among these were two symphonic ballets, Les
Presages , set to Tchaikowsky s Fifth Symphony, and Chorear-
tium , set to Brahms Fourth. Music-lovers disputed whether or not
it was fitting to arrange dances and settings to symphonic music.
Most musicians disliked the experiment; most ballet-lovers ap
proved.
Between de Basil s, the most fashionable ballet company, and
Rene Blum s there was bitter rivalry. Indeed, the ballet world
was full of factions: there were threatened splits and law-suits
within de Basil s company itself. There were also British com
panies, the Markova-Dolin and the Vic-Wells, and companies not
in the Russian tradition, such as Trudi Schoop s comic Swiss
Ballet and the German-Dutch Expressionist Ballet Jooss. Many
books were written on ballet. The first and most successful of
these was Arnold HaskelTs Ralletomama. Like most of its succes-
338 THE DEEPENING TWILIGHT OF BARBARISM*
sors, it contained an historical account of ballet, an appreciation
of famous dancers, summaries of the scenarios of different ballets,
an explanation of the technical terms used in choreography, and
an impressionistic description of how the writer was so entranced
when he saw his first ballet that he became for ever afterwards
a balletomane thus a new word was introduced into the Eng
lish language. Few developments had taken place in ballet since
Diaghileff days, but its new popularity coincided with the decline
of grand opera, which to some extent it replaced as the great cul
tural event of London s summer season. Ballet had speed and
complexity; grand opera lumbered.
Since the Twenties much private energy had gone into the
application of art to industry the intention being to give indus
trial products a cleaner look and neater lines. In the motor-car
and domestic-heating industries and a few others this had been
done most successfully. Cars now looked as if they had really been
designed and not just assembled. British designers, however, never
went so far as to clothe the anatomy of their machines with great,
glossy, bulging curves and metal flutings in the American style.
The gas companies household models were very easy on the eye.
White Ascot heaters, for example, replaced the old copper
geysers with their inconvenient paraphernalia of pipes; cooking-
stoves no longer looked like Victorian laboratory equipment; and
pink, clean-looking waffle-shaped elements took the place of the
old dirty-white, curly, spikey ones in gas fires. Telephones, too
nearly all now on automatic exchanges were no longer upright
and awkward, but compact and tolerably graceful. There were
also improvements in lighting: opaque glass balls, directly attached
to the ceiling or suspended from it by metal rods, compared
favourably with the clumsily ornate electric chandeliers that went
before; angle-poise reading-lamps that would swing and bend in
any desired direction, though suggesting dentists apparatus, were
not vicious in appearance; and indirect, reflected lighting was used
from several subsidiary points in a room. Where industrial design
was at its worst was in any decorative effect intended to brighten
up functional fittings. Lamp-shades and ash-trays were perhaps
the most ornate, mean and fussy form of household decoration,
though book-ends ran these very close. It was the period of the
THE DEEPENING TWILIGHT OF BARBARISM 339
mock bronze finish to hardware and the artificial ageing of gilt and
parchment. At the same time a great many famous old lines in
household furnishing were either discontinued or debased. It was
of melancholy interest to assemble, in series, successive variants
of such outstanding products as the eighteenth-century Windsor
chair, or the mid- Victorian Rose, Shamrock and Thistle (mauve
flowers encrusted on white) china breakfast service, or the small
Regency picture-frame. The gradual deterioration of quality, de
sign, workmanship was most remarkable. If one wanted an ordinary
small brown-black teapot, a blue and white china beer-mug, or a
simple-flowered small white china basin, one could only hope to
find it in some old-fashioned village shop. New British lines in
cheap china and glass combined the sordid with the flashy.
People who bought or rented unmodernized houses had great
difficulty in buying suitable furniture and fittings for them. Unless
one was rich enough to go to one of the very few shops that still
employed their own craftsmen and catered for cultivated taste,
the unappetizing choice was between the mass-produced mock-
antique, the modernist gorblimey or god-awful in veneered
walnut or bleached oak, tubular steel, light-coloured plywood.
The only solution was to c shop in the past at country sales, street
markets, or antique shops.
This break in tradition had an obviously depressing effect on
the British Export Trade and in 1935 an Art in Industry Exhibi
tion was held at Burlington House to improve matters. One hun
dred thousand people attended, but the exhibits tended to reflect
the dead academic taste of the old-fashioned polytechnic schools
where the ghost of Ruskin still walked. The Government was then
persuaded to sponsor a National Register of artists who could be
recommended to manufacturers as persons of imagination, experi
ence, and taste. The director of this extremely important venture,
though starved of funds, did a great deal to improve designs in a
number of industries; and made some surprising discoveries such
as that in the whole of Great Britain there was no school or art-
class where one could learn the art of shoe-design so that the
very important shoe industry was dependent on France and Amer
ica for new models.
In modern houses, cupboards and bookshelves were built into
the walls to economize space. Windows were made of steel, and
340 THE DEEPENING TWILIGHT OF BARBARISM
opened outwards: they let in more light and air than the old
sliding sash. Walls and floors were sound-proofed. A new sort of
window glass was introduced which admitted ultra-violet rays.
Plate-glass was used for table-tops in homes as well as teashops.
Yet, by the middle Thirties, neo-Victorianism was blending with
functionalism. Curtains, bedcovers, and chaircovers no longer simu
lated wood, metal and concrete; losing their geometries too, they
grew delicately dotted, spotted, striped, and flowered. Even floral
wallpapers came in again and Victorian knick-knacks were rescued
from street-barrows for quaint effect.
It was odd that this geometric fashion in interior decoration
should have passed just as the works of the Parisian abstract
artists of the Twenties, who had initiated it, were for the first
time being put over on the British public. The leading British
abstractionists now banded themselves together into a group, Unit
One . The sculptors were Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore,
the architects Wells Coates and Colin Lucas, and among the
painters were Ben Nicholson, Edward Wadsworth, Tristram Hillier
and Paul Nash. They set their faces, in a manifesto, against the
unconscious school (meaning Expressionism and its derivatives,
which many of them had once embraced), declaring that it had
completely broken away from the intellectual canons of abstract
art. They offered themselves as a rallying point from which mod
ern art, by its proved integrity, could influence modern life. A
questionnaire was sent round to the members, asking what they
felt (among other things) about Freud, Symbolism, and machinery.
The answers revealed that Freud and Symbolism were no longer
the dominating influences but that machinery had a strong attrac
tion stronger than that of natural scenery, because of its purpose
fully intricate design.
But the usual twelve-year time-lag having elapsed, there fol
lowed an importation of Surrealism from Paris. The first Surrealist
Exhibition in England was held in 1936, and of course greeted in
the Press with mockery and jeers. J. B. Priestley, who schooled
himself as a new William Cobbett, tried to express the attitude of
the average sturdy Englishman to the Surrealists: They stand for
violence and neurotic unreason. They are truly decadent. You
catch -a^glimgsej^
THE DEEPENING TWILIGHT OF BARBARISM 341
that may soon blot out the sky, until at last humanity finds
itself STanoiSter long rogfitT . 7 . There are about too many effem
inate or epicene young men, lisping and undulating. Too many
young women without manners, balance, dignity greedy and
slobbering sensation-seekers. Too many people who are steadily
lapsing into shaved and powdered barbarism. . . . Frequently
they have strong sexual impulses that they soon contrive to mis
use or pervert. (This was rather like his dramatic experiments
with Time: He was twelve years out of date with his remarks. But
then, so were the newly made converts to Surrealism.) The attrac
tion of Surrealism was twofold its French connection with Com
munism and psycho-analysis, and the similarity between objets
trouves\ *collages\ and constructions and the neo-Victorian
knick-knack collecting habit. The Surrealists, by the way, had
made grands mcAtres of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, the Vic
torian nonsense-writers.
Aesthetic judgements fall outside the scope of this history. How
ever, it would be misleading to treat of painting in Britain during
the period as wholly a matter of fashion, though complete com
mercial art was necessarily so, and since the livelihood of painters
was precarious in a B.B.G dialogue between a layman and an
art-expert it came out that not more than twelve good painters
could be supported by the normal demand for their pictures the
competition for this market was intense, and regard for fashion
naturally affected style. One must distinguish two sorts of fashion,
to the first of which almost every painter had necessarily to make
concessions the fashion determined by the setting in which his
pictures would be hung. Just as, with the decrease in the size of
families and of ovens farmers had to reduce the size of the joints
they offered the butchers, so pictures had to become smaller be
cause of reduced wall-space in the houses of picture buyers.
Sombre tones too, in the elder Rembrandt tradition, though they
harmonized well enough with late Victorian furnishings, did not
consort with neo-Georgian white walls. (Heavy gilt frames had
also to be abandoned.) But the second sort of fashion, as irrespon
sible as the fashion in dress and similarity set in Paris, was felt by
a number of British painters to be beneath their dignity.
A pleasant analogy is suggested by Savile Row. Throughout
34 2 THE DEEPENING TWILIGHT OF BARBARISM
the period it set the world standard of men s tailoring as authori
tatively as the Rue de la Paix set the fashion for women. In gen
eral the small Savile Row of British painters withstood the temp
tation to shelter themselves under the shield of the Royal Academy.
James Pryde and William Nicholson, who as the Beggarstaff
Brothers before the war had first shown the possibilities of British
poster-design, were the deans of the non-Academic school. Pryde
continued to paint large thrillingly gloomy pictures for large
houses; Nicholson turned his hand to portraiture, book-illustra
tion, frescoes, decor for Cochran shows and anything else that
came to hand, but was best known for his sedate and exquisite
still-lives. Walter Greaves, in his last years as a Charterhouse
Brother, also came into the period: with James Pryde, he was the
last of the British Old Masters. He called himself a humble pupil of
Whistler s and grossly underestimated his standing. Richard Sickert
was of Savile Row too he consented to enter the Royal Academic
fold in 1934, but, like Augustus John, resigned soon afterwards
because of disagreements with the hanging committee. His pic
tures were influenced by the late Impressionists, full of elegant
shadow-work.
In the Twenties one painter of genius in the most traditional
sense of the word appeared: young Christopher Wood. He
lived a stormy life and put everything into his work. In 1927 he
found his imagination revving at too great a speed; he tried to
keep pace by painting sixty pictures in a few weeks, then broke
down. He threw himself under an express train at Salisbury sta
tion, leaving as explanation a few mysterious sentences on a slip
of paper. He wrote that living jmnds were now at large on the
earth did they know who they were?
These aristocrats of painting felt committed to the task of
making good pictures, not of being advanced or testing theories
of composition. Cedric Morris and John Aldridge were others.
Morris s peculiar gift was for depicting the movements of ani
mals and birds in delicate lines and colours. Aldridge was a land
scape painter: he worked chiefly in a part of rural Essex that still
retained a Tudor aspect. Then there were the Puritans, such as
Paul and John Nash and Edward Bawden. They represented Eng
lish provincial life and seem to have mistrusted, while admiring,
THE DEEPENING TWILIGHT OF BARBARISM 343
the aristocracy; they had sufficient integrity to limit themselves to
a narrow scrupulous vision John Nash s engravings of poisonous
plants, Bawden s cynical illustrations to Shakespeare s comedies,
were in the Thomas Bewick tradition. Stanley Spencer was an
abnormal case. He was a Puritan too, and seemed to regard oil-
paint as somehow improper (as Milton was embarrassed by the
Elizabethan tradition of poetry), but accepted the fuller gift of
sight of which Bawden and the Nashes were shy; yet as a fellow-
painter expressed it, being something of a gnome himself, he can t
resist monstrosities, except in landscape . There were also Duncan
Grant and Vanessa Bell, much admired in Bloomsbury and strongly
influenced by the careful but free style of Greek fresco and
ceramics.
To use Army organization terms painting is properly the I
branch, intelligent reporting; poetry is properly the O branch,
active decision. Both have connections with the Q branch, which
covers the medium and the distributive system. The muddle into
which poetry and the arts fell during the period was due to a gen
eral confusion of letters: ambitious artists, from the Futurists on
wards, attempted to be O, not I; the poets of socio-realism,
attempted to be I, not O; commercial art, literature, and music
fell directly under the command of Q. Towards the end of the
Thirties appeared John Piper, who abandoned the abstractionism
with which he started for a truly realistic style, and the Euston
Road group, most of whom went back to start again from an
Impressionist technique, showing that contemporary painting had
solid foundations but was in no less confused a state than con
temporary poetry.
Fashions in dress continued to exploit Victorian costume as a
reminder to women that they were distinctly women, not mere
emancipated modern creatures. Square shoulders were temporarily
dropped in 1934; in some cases they were succeeded by sloping,
shoulders and wide necks, which gave a bottle-shaped effect.
Wider and wider belts were emphasizing the increasing slendemess
of waists. Sleeves were full, loose and bell-shaped, even busde-like
skirts began to appear for evening wear. The iSjo s were fast
creeping up on the 1890 $. Jubilee Year brought even more fanciful
trimmings: day skirts were gored and flared, and evening skirts
344 THE DEEPENING TWILIGHT OF BARBARISM
" lavishly draped and trained. More and more ornaments were worn:
heavy jewelled belts, breast-plates of fine wire, and initial decora
tions in wood, leather, metal, and glass. The Chinese Exhibition
was an excuse for new colours: duck-egg blue, pale green and
black, scarlet and white. Hats were much influenced by the taste
of the Duchess of Kent. At different times in Jubilee Year she wore
a Homburg type, a Breton-sailor, a small toque-like straw with
flower trimmings, a shovel-hat, and on Jubilee Day itself an im
mense picture-hat. All these had a wide following-. It was the
Duchess, too, who in 1936 popularized the fashion for eye-veils
on hats, some of the finest mesh and some of coarse fish-net. In
the winter of that year she was one of the first to wear the modish
conical, pierrot-like caps. The death of King George V in January
1936 caused black and other sombre colours to be fashionable.
These were only slightly relieved by touches of mauve and grey.
Even in spring the court-mourning fashion persisted, though now
mitigated by a revived enthusiasm for artificial flowers. These were
worn everywhere: on hats, on lapels, on gloves, and on frocks,
and tightly bunched up under the chin. Towards the end of the
year, the coming Coronation began to influence colours. A new
vivid blue was patriotically christened Royalist , a pinky mauve
Regency , a deep crimson Coronation , and a more purpled crim
son Durbar .
For some years American film stars had set dress and hair fash
ions among British film-goers. In 1934, for the first time, a British
picture had a similar effect: The Private Life of Henry VIIF
started the vogue of looped, slashed, and padded sleeves, and one
of the hat-crazes of the year the Tudor halo style, usually carried
out in velvet. Another spring hat was the shallow-crowned boater
with streamers at the back, inspired by Katharine Hepburn in
Little Women . Films played a large part in the Victorian revival.
The hair-dressing styles of the Eighties were introduced by The
House of Rothschild and by Anna Sten in Lady of the Boule
vards her hair done like one of Manet s Parisian barmaids. The
Great Ziegfeld 3 in 1936 set a lush, romantic fashion that affected
colours, materials, and designs. The film version of Romeo and
Juliet produced the Juliet cap, the Juliet frock, long, demure and
generally made of velvet, and the Juliet bob, in which the hair was
THE DEEPENING TWILIGHT OF BARBARISM 345
parted in the middle and fell almost to the shoulders in long,
heavy curls. These were put on the market before the film was
released, as part of its publicity campaign. They were rapidly
taken up: every shop now had to stock replicas of film-stars* hats
and dresses and shoes. Upper-class women still looked to Paris
for their fashions, but the working girl to Hollywood.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Three Kings in One Year
There had been no entertaining news-stories in the Press for some
rime. The Talking Mongoose broke the spell. Reports had been
published some years previously that the house of a farmer named
Irving, in the Isle of Man, was visited by a talking mongoose,
Harry Price, the psychic research expert, became interested in the
case, and went there to investigate. With him went R. S. Lambert,
editor of the Listener, who was an amateur student of psychic
phenomena. The Irving family told these two that the mongoose
had at first made meaningless noises, and developed the power of
speech only after coaxing. It had then told them that its name
was Gef and that it was of Eastern origin. It knew a smattering of
foreign languages and used to sing nursery rhymes. Its greatest
friend in the household was the Irvings daughter, whom it used
to accompany on rabbit hunts, but all the family claimed to have
seen it from time to time and to have heard it talk. When Price and
Lambert were present, however, the mongoose remained invisible;
the Irvings explained that it had positively refused to appear in
the presence of those who doubted its existence. Price and Lambert
assured the shy animal that they did not doubt, but this did not
tempt it to materialize; and they had to content themselves with
examining the only evidence offered a few blurred photographs,
in which the animal was indistinguishable from the hillside, and
some hairs and footprints, which were not unlike a dog s. On their
return to London, Price and Lambert published, under the title of
The Haunting of Cashen s Gap, a circumstantial account of the
mongoose story. In it they discussed the possibility of poltergeist
activity on the part of the livings daughter, and suggested that a
deliberately created family legend might have taken such hold that
the family itself had come to believe in it; yet they did not entirely
rule out the possibility of the Irvings account being a true one.
346
THREE KINGS IN ONE YEAR 347
The mongoose story was good enough to take from the book
page and put into the secondary news columns; but it made the
front page when it figured in a libel action brought by Lambert
against Sir Cecil Levita. Sir Cecil was a member of the L.C.C.
and of the committee which advised the Home Office on matters
of Film Censorship. The action arose out of disagreements at the
Film Institute, of which Lambert was a director, and in which Sir
Cecil and his wife were interested. These disagreements led Sir
Cecil to allege that Lambert was not a fit person to be a director;
among other things he instanced Lambert s supposed credulity
in the matter of the talking mongoose. The matter did not remain
a private one, for Sir Cecil made contact with B.B.C. officials, and
Lambert felt that his position as editor of the Listener was being
endangered. The B.B.C. Council acted somewhat equivocally; at
first it advised Lambert to settle the problem amicably, and then,
when that proved out of the question, warned him that he was
prejudicing his position with them by persisting in bringing an
action. The B.B.C., in fact, felt the matter to be so important that
Sir John Reith himself took a hand in the negotiations; however,
Lambert could not be dissuaded from suing, won his case, and was
awarded the enormous sum of 7,500 damages. He also kept his
position on the Listener.
The newspapers made the most of the talking mongoose evi
dence in the case. After it was over an official inquiry was held
into the conduct of the B.B.C, commemorated by Low with car
toons of *Sir John Mongoose and the Trained Keiths and The
B.B.C. Haunted . The Board of Inquiry apportioned the blame all
round, but admonished the B.B.C. not to allow the personal free
dom of its staff to be unduly limited by loyalty to the Corporation.
For several years some of the B.B.C. staff had imagined that their
private lives were being too much supervised, their letters opened,
their movements watched, even their telephone lines tapped. Mat
ters now improved.
B.B.C. programmes were still too serious for a large part of the
population; on Sundays they were gloomily puritanical and almost
everyone then switched across to Radio Luxemburg and Radio
Normandie, stations which gave light popular music and variety
turns, sponsored by advertisers. The B.B.C. could not complain of
an infringement of its monopoly: for the recordings, though made
34 8 THREE KINGS IN ONE YEAR
in London, were transmitted from the Continent, and any new
British radio licenses taken out by fans of these stations benefited
only the B.B.C.; but it was hurt in its pride. The Press felt hurt in
its pockets: the Press Barons grudged money spent on radio adver
tising that would normally have been spent on newspaper advertis
ing. The only newspaper which had printed Radio Luxemburg
programmes was the Sunday Referee one of the few papers inde
pendent of the big Press combines. The Newspaper Proprietors
Association tried to stop it from doing so in 1934, and when it
refused expelled it from membership. This meant that it could no
longer benefit from the co-operative distributing arrangements
which the Association ran. The Referee found it worth while to
continue its publication of Luxemburg programmes for the next
three years; but at last the sales-organization of the newspaper
combines proved too strong. It found itself gradually losing its
advertisements and, abandoning Luxemburg, humbly pleaded for
readmission to the Association. The public never came to know of
the pressure and counter-pressure exercised in the Luxemburg con
troversy. Newspapers now seldom washed their dirty linen in
public. But Radio Luxemburg was not closed down until 1939.
In the spring of 1936, as it was said, there was mud on some
one s dress-shirt . The Budget of that year raised income-tax by
threepence and the tea-tax by twopence. Somehow news of these
increases leaked out just before Budget Day and there was specu
lation in insurance against them on the Stock Exchange. J. H.
Thomas, then Lord Privy Seal, and his son, were strongly rumoured
to have been the channels of the leakage. Thomas immediately
asked for an official inquiry to be made. This was granted, and
after investigation the official tribunal reported, despite the strong
denials of all concerned, that there had been an unauthorized
disclosure by J. H. Thomas to Sir Alfred Butt, the theatre magnate,
and a colleague of his named Bates, who had been spending the
week end with him. The tribunal found that they had made use of
the information for private gain . Thomas s son was completely
exonerated, and Thomas himself excused on the grounds that his
disclosure merely took the form of an indiscreet hint, and was not
to be judged hardly. Though not prosecuted, he was compelled to
retire into private life, with the condolences of all other Cabinet
Ministers.
THREE KINGS IN ONE YEAR 349
This was a big story for the Press, but there was another alto
gether too big for them to handle or even to hint at: King Edward
VTII s friendship with Mrs. Wallis Simpson. For many years die
Press had agreed not to attack Royalty or mention its foibles:
Royalty was not fair game because, by etiquette, forbidden to
reply. The last recorded offence was by a famous sporting sheet in
the Nineties which headed its news column one week with the
gratuitous statement that there was "nothing whatever between the
Prince of Wales and Lily Langtry and the next week with the
apparently unrelated remark: Not even a sheet. The Press now
chose to impose a censorship upon itself, for though the King
wished the matter to be no secret from the public, the Cabinet was
so embarrassed that it refused the Press official directions as to
what line to take. Mrs. Simpson had occasionally been mentioned
in Court Circulars, and one or two photographs of her in the com
pany of the King and other friends had appeared at the time of his
Mediterranean holiday on the yacht Nahlin, but she had not been
publicized in any other way. Meanwhile, British subscribers to
American magazines and readers of the Communist-edited The
Week, a postally distributed news-letter, were learning of her
friendship with the King, of the King s intention to marry her, and
of the constitutional crisis that was brewing. Speculators immedi
ately began buying up the leases of houses on the fringe of Regent s
Park near the Marylebone Road: Mrs. Simpson was known to be
installing herself there. The public at large knew nothing. When
the Ne*ws Chronicle in the autumn splashed the report that Mrs.
Simpson was going to Ipswich to obtain a divorce, few of its
readers knew what this implied, or troubled to inquire. The Daily
Telegraph and other newspapers kept the news small. Ipswich and
the Assize Judge himself were surprised by the crowds of Ameri
can reporters, plain-clothes men, K.Cs, and by the general hugger-
mugger at this undefended and unsensational case. A decree nisi
was granted. An emergency Cabinet Meeting was called on 28th
November 1936, but what it met to consider was not officially
announced in fact, hints were thrown out of a crisis in the Medi
terranean.
The news broke in The Yorkshire Post. It came as a gloss on a
remark by Dr. Blunt, Bishop of Bradford, to a Diocesan Confer
ence: he had wished that the King showed more positive signs of
350 THREE KINGS IN ONE YEAR
his awareness that he stood in need of Divine Grace. Soon the
startled country learned that the King intended to marry a Mrs.
Simpson, after having raised her to the peerage as Duchess of Lan
caster. Yet what sort of person was this Mrs. Simpson? And who
was Mr. Simpson? The Press did not commit itself to more than
the barest biographical details.
The situation was complicated politically by the recent news
paper treatment of the Kong s visit to South Wales. During this
visit he had expressed surprise and horror at the living conditions
in the Specjal^Areasand declared that something must be done .
The Daily Mail thereupon made a contrast between the King s
energy and the National Government s inactivity, and this view
took a strong hold on the country. The semi-official Times on
November 24th took the trouble to deny a rumour that the King s
visit to Wales had been made against the advice of his Ministers.
Baldwin, meanwhile, had called a Cabinet Meeting to discuss the
situation, and on November 2 6th told his colleagues that the King
wished them to take legislative action which would permit him to
marry Mrs. Simpson, but without making her his Queen, and resign
all claims to the Throne on behalf of their putative issue. The
"Cabinet unanimously decided that such action would be uncon
stitutional. Next, the Dominion Governments were asked for their
opinion, and their replies showed that in the Empire a doubly
divorced woman was not considered a suitable Royal consort.
Dominion feeling carried great weight because the person of the
King was now the Empire s only remaining political link. But this
feeling was not confined to the Dominions: The Times expressed
it plainly, and it was a commonplace that what The Times was
writing the Government was usually thinking.
On the night of December ist a fiery omen was seen from
Central London in the south-eastern sky. The word went round
that the Crystal Palace was on fire. Everyone who could hurried
there in buses, trains, and cars. The Crystal Palace, the Palladium
of Victorianism, had been one of the sights of London ever since
its original erection for the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park in 1851;
but Sydenham was rather an inconvenient place to get at and the
interior of the building was growing sadly dilapidated. Its principal
uses now were as a hall for brass-band and choir competitions, dog
THREE KINGS IN ONE YEAR 351
and cat shows and the like the grounds were chiefly devoted to
football and November jth fireworks. What to do with the Crystal
Palace had long been a moot point. Sir Edwin Lutyens, the archi
tect and President of the Royal Academy, drily suggested that it
should be preserved in a glass case for posterity*. The fire, the most
spectacular one of the century, completely destroyed the main
building and only the twin towers at either end were left stand
ing. The current rumour was that the Palace had been delib
erately fired, as offering a too prominent landmark for German
bombers.
On December 3rd the crisis was for the first rime aired in the
Press. The Daily Herald went much further in its opposition to the
King s plan than most of the pro-Government papers. This was
because the Labour Party was supported in ex-Liberal constitu
encies by a large number of Nonconformists: in the north of Eng
land particularly they were shocked at the idea that the King pro
posed to marry not only a commoner, but also a foreigner and a
divorced woman. (British public characters, especially politicians,
had to live very careful private lives to pass the scrutiny of the
Nonconformists: how careful, was shown in the early Twenties
when Asquith succeeded in picking a Derby winner by careful
comparison of pedigrees and had to protect himself with a public
statement that he had not backed his judgement by so much as a
sixpenny bet.) Discussion led nowhere, however, and still nobody
told the public what to think. Baldwin took his customary refuge
in the silence of sealed lips ; and the country and the Empire were
left to the mercy of rumour.
Most ordinary people were for the King; most important people
were against him. Churchill expressed the ordinary point of view
when he accused the Prime Minister in the House of betraying
both the King and Parliament. The Beaverbrook Press followed
the same line, its aim being as much to get rid of Baldwin as to
support the King. Intrigues became complicated: it was rumoured
that Beaverbrook and Churchill were pressing the King not to give
way to the Cabinet. Churchill was mentioned as an alternative
Prime Minister; if he were gainsaid in the Commons, it was felt, he
could carry the country with him in a general election. Sixty
M.P.S were supposed to have written to the King, pledging their
35 2 THREE KINGS IN ONE YEAR
support. Nevertheless, nobody could tell how a general election
would go, nor how the Dominions would react if Churchill were
successful. The risk was not run.
On December 4th Baldwin took a firm line: he announced that
the Government must refuse the King s wish, since legislation
^could not be introduced to permit such a special kind of marriage
the King s wife must automatically be Queen and her oifspring
heirs to the Throne. The feeling that the King was getting a raw
deal from his Ministers was openly expressed. That night diners
rose at restaurants and addressed the tables, proposing a loyal toast
which nobody could refuse; and crowds paraded the streets shout
ing God save the King from Mr. Baldwin!
For the next few days the newspapers were full of the Grave
Constitutional Crisis , but it could not be foreseen what would
happen. A black gloom spread throughout the country, with a most
depressing effect on trade. Rumours now went round that the King
was seeing more of Mrs. Simpson than was proper for a woman
with a decree nisi, and a Common Informer complicated matters
by lodging a statement which, if investigated by the King s Proc
tor, and proved true, would have prevented the divorce from being
made absolute. The King was said to be consulting with Queen
Mary and the Royal Family; and to believe that his subjects would
not let him be overruled by the Cabinet in his choice of a wife.
Whatever the feelings of Queen Mary and other members of the
-Royal Family may have been, there was certainly strong opposition
among the officials at Buckingham Palace. They had resented the
King s departure from the rigid standard of church-going be
haviour which his father had set, and criticized his habit of spending
week ends at his estate in Fort Belvedere, where one of his favour
ite occupations, said to have been encouraged by Mrs. Simpson,
was pottering about the gardens in shabby flannels. They were
even more indignant that the King had dismissed some of their own
number and replaced them with upstart youngsters. It was also
alleged that he was impatient of dull functions and had even on
occasion, by ordering the drastic curtailment of a musical pro
gramme, hurt the feelings of the loyal performers. And how insen
sate an act it had been to remove from Windsor Great Park the
herd of Royal Goats that had pastured there for generations and
confine the poor creatures to a pen at the Zoo!
THREE KINGS IN ONE YEAR 353
After hurried conferences with the Royal Family and with his
Ministers, the King left London to stay at Fort Belvedere; and Mrs.
Simpson, to preserve herself and the King from further scandal,
went to France. She was said to have begged him not to give up his
throne for her. Baldwin s lips, meanwhile, were again sealed. In the
Commons he was greeted with cheering, but when asked by Attlee
to make a statement, replied that it was inexpedient. The suspense
continued. At a mass meeting in the Albert Hall crowds cheered
Churchill and fervently sang God Save the King . The Press, how
ever, was dropping hints of the way things were going: the Daily
Mail even dared to mention the word Abdication. On the morning
of December 8th there was a confident rumour that the King, who
in a recruiting speech during the war had urged the men of Britain
to put their Country before their womenfolk, would show his
patriotism by giving up Mrs. Simpson; that afternoon it was ru
moured, just as confidently, that he would not. An advertisement
appeared in the Bradford Telegraph and Argus: The King may
abdicate, but with the love for Dixon s jams and pickles the family
sticks together like the Empire.
The Times urged the King to make up his mind, and put the -
blame on him for the excited and puzzled state of public opinion.
Harry Pollitt, the Communist leader, in a speech at Cambridge,
denounced the Government: *The spectacle of the National Gov
ernment laying down a code of morals and behaviour for the King
is indeed a sight. . . . There is no crisis in all this business for the
working class. Let the King marry whom he likes. That is his
personal business/ But it would have taken more than a Communist
to persuade people to be indifferent. In London crowds packed
Downing Street, chanting We want our King , and at Wool-
worth s the Edward VIII Coronation mugs were rapidly sold out.
Unlike Pollitt, Mosley set himself and his Blackshirts on the side
of Royalty. He had thousands of leaflets distributed which declared
that the British Union of Fascists stood firmly behind the King.
This was a disservice to the King s cause. It gave the conservative-
minded the opportunity to utter warnings against the country s
being split into two factions Parliament and the King s Friends:
public opinion was already bitterly divided by the Spanish prob
lem, and if the constitutional crisis were to aggravate the division it
might mean civil war for Britain too. Further pressure was put on
354 THREE KINGS IN ONE YEAR
the King to make up his mind, and his resentful silence was taken
advantage of by his enemies to set a strong rumour going that he
had drunk himself insensible and was only saved from death by the
timely use of a stomach pump.
The end came on December loth. At 3.35 Baldwin entered the
House of Commons and read the Royal message of Abdication.
The House received the news in silence; the country felt stunned.
The strongest rumour of the week then ran around that the Duke
of York would refuse the Throne, from fraternal loyalty, and that
it would pass to the Princess Elizabeth, with Queen Mary as
Regent. These were the two most popular members of the Royal
Family and with the rumour went the observation that England
had never been so well off as when it was ruled by women. Every
one felt suddenly cheerful again. In the evening the King, now
Prince Edward, introduced by Sir John Reith himself, broadcast
his farewell speech to the nation in an angry, tragic, harsh voice.
He gave up his Throne, he said, because he could not be happy
without the woman he loved, and he commended to his former
subjects his brother, King George VI: God bless you, and God
save the King. Next morning he left England in the destroyer
Fury, and went to stay in Austria with Baron Rothschild. His reign
had lasted for 325 days. The upper-class Conservatives were deeply
relieved when the Duke of York succeeded; he was known to con
form to the conventional type of constitutional monarch. The
Stock Exchange rallied, trade revived, and the Common Informer
obligingly withdrew his statement, admitting that he had been
mistaken.
The ex-King, now the Duke of Windsor, was not allowed to
pass into retirement without recrimination. The Archbishop of
Canterbury censured him immediately after his departure for hav-
ng sought his private happiness c . . . within a social circle whose
standards and way of life are alien to all the best instincts of his
people. This attack caused a strong recrudescence of feeling in
favour of the Duke. He had been through a difficult time, it was
felt, and it was bad form to kick a man when he s down . The cam
paign which the Archbishop had hoped to inaugurate for a revival
of church-going failed ignominiously.
The Press, for the next six months, printed little news about the
Duke, except occasional photographs of him in Austria and of
THREE KINGS IN ONE YEAR 355
Mrs. Simpson in the south of France. He was pushed out of the
limelight, so that the personality of his brother, hitherto scarcely
known to the public, could be slowly and tactfully built up to
kingly dimensions. Most people believed that they could never
have die same feelings for King George VI as for his father, or his
brother. The Left rejoiced that the Abdication had at last served to
break down the atmosphere of hysterical mysticism with which the
Royal Family had been surrounded. No more, they said, would,
kings be looked upon as anything but human.
The Daily Telegraph summed up the year 1936 on December
3ist with:
Certain years in history seem to have been desperately charged
with Fate. Of their number is the year whose last hours are now
passing. It is not that 1936 will be memorable by the magnitude of
its actual catastrophes. But it has abounded in events which have
seemed to bring catastrophe near. Serious alarms at home, graver
alarms abroad, a deepening sense of gathering storm, feverish mili
tary, naval and aerial preparations, revolution and civil war have
kept Europe continually on tenterhooks. That there are more white
stones in die British record than in the general European is matter
rather for thankfulness than for pride. Yet the British people have
not escaped affliction. Within a single twelvemonth three Kings
have reigned over us. . . .
The Coronation of King George VT was fixed for the 1 2th May
1937, die same date as had been fixed for King Edward VIIFs. The
Coronation was to be a far grander and more impressive spectacle
than the Jubilee of two years before. To the splendid official street-
decorations householders and shop-owners added a bewildering
variety of their own. A rare exception was Bond Street, the whole
of which was worthily dressed by one architect. The large stores
in London tried to outdo one another in the matter of Union Jacks,
coloured banners, and bunting, boxes of red, white and blue flow
ers, huge placard portraits of the King and Queen, pictures of stir
ring scenes from Empire history, and gigantic plaster casts of
symbolic statuary. By a common verdict, Selfridge s took first
prize. There is a story that a policeman said to an old lady who had
been staring at the decorations continuously for half an hour on
Coronation Night: No, madam, Mr. Selfridge will not be appear
ing on the balcony to-night! An Indian Rajah was so impressed
356 THREE KINGS IN ONE YEAR
by them that he bought them as they stood for re-erection on his
own palace. Vast crowds came to Town: one thousand special
trains arrived on Coronation Day alone, and fleets of charabancs.
The newspapers printed full descriptions of the complicated cere
mony to take place in Westminster Abbey. The rejoicing was more
formal and less spontaneous than at the Jubilee. The Abdication
had shaken people; also there was a general belief that the King s
health was bad and that he suffered from a serious speech defect.
This the newspapers roundly denied. They tried hard to associate
George VI with George V in popular sympathy. The Daily
Express wrote on Coronation Day: We have not known him long,
but long enough to discover in him some of the steady, sterling
stuff that made his father the most beloved Englishman of his gen
eration. He was to carry on the tradition of kindly kingship non-
political, non-social and, in general behaviour, above criticism. The
wits even said that his chin was already showing signs of a beard.
References to the Duke of Windsor were officially taboo. Some
slum-dwellers in East London, however, hung up banners which
read: God bless our King and Queen AND the Duke of Windsor.
A Roman Catholic publisher s advertisement referred obliquely to
recent events in a quotation from Shakespeare: Now is the winter
of our discontent made glorious by this summer sun of York.
Huge crowds waited all night along the route that the proces
sion was to take on Coronation Day, some even setting up camp-
beds in the street. Seats in buildings, in stands, and in hotels over
looking the route had been sold long in advance often at profiteer
ing prices. The night was fine, and so, fortunately, was the morn
ing. Peers wearing their coronets and ceremonial robes and M.P.S
in hired costumes were crammed together into a special Under
ground train which carried them from Kensington High Street to
Westminster. There were eight hundred of them, and the fare was
threepence a head.
The Crowned Heads of Europe were most of them present, or
represented by their Heirs Apparent, but the complicated inter
national situation was reflected in the absence of any member of
the House of Savoy the King of Italy s new tide as Emperor of
Abyssinia went unrecognized in the representation of Germany
not by a Nazi but by an Army officer, and in the ironical presence
of a Spanish Republican Minister. The Press concentrated its de-
THREE KINGS IN ONE YEAR 357
scriptive reporting on the impressive robes of African chiefs such
as the Nigerian Alake of Abeokuta, and the Paramount Chief of
Barotseland; and on the soldierly bearing of the Canadian contin
gent that mounted guard at Buckingham Palace for the first time in
history, and of the other Imperial troops. The great golden Coro
nation Coach itself, first used by George III in 1762, trundled
archaically down smooth parquetted streets between high, grimy
Portland stone buildings. It was drawn by the famous team of
Windsor greys. Reporters, looking for the human touch, were
pleased to notice Peers sneaking out of the Abbey for a smoke
during the ceremony, and bored pages teasing one another. They
also remarked that the Bible provided for the rehearsal had proved
too heavy for the aged Bishop of Norwich, whose task it was to
carry it, and that a lighter one had been substituted. The American
touch was provided by Neil Vanderbilt, the millionaire s son. He
had secured a ticket for the Abbey, and during the ceremony was
seen to be praying constantly into his waistcoat: where he was
broadcasting a commentary through a pocket radio transmitter.
This was picked up by his trailer, parked a few hundred yards
away, and from there transmitted direct to the United States a
magnificent scoop, for no broadcasting but the B.B.C/S had been
allowed from the Abbey.
After the ceremony a crowd of one hundred thousand gathered
outside Buckingham Palace and cheered; the Royal Family ap
peared four times in all to greet it the first time they were wear
ing their Coronation robes, crowns, and coronets. That evening
the King made a broadcast speech, in which he dedicated himself to
National Service. It was noted with relief that his voice, though
hesitant, carried well and that he only showed one slight trace of
a stammer. Later there were half-hearted attempts at dancing in the
streets, but rain put an early end to them; and in any case most
people were in a hurry to start for home, because there was a
London bus-strike in progress. At one time it had been feared that
the Underground railwaymen would come out in sympathy, but
this danger was averted. Rather than cast a gloom on the Corona
tion proceedings, the Press had played down the bus-strike and
contented itself with publishing pictures of people walking cheer
fully to work. On the whole the public felt no grudge against the
busmen. It was easy to sympathize with them over their long hours
35 8 THREE KINGS IN ONE YEAR
of heavy driving in crowded streets with speeded-up time-tables.
The expectation of life for Metropolitan bus-drivers was said to be
the shortest in any ordinary trade or calling the country clergy
had the highest. The trouble was ulcers of the stomach, due to
nervous strain, hasty meals, and fumes from exhausts.
The organization of the Coronation traffic was so flawless that
almost the only fatal street accident recorded was the death in Bird
Cage Walk of an elderly Australian V.C., knocked down by a boy
on a bicycle a day or two beforehand. When all was over, requests
for souvenirs of the official decorations came in at the rate of eight
thousand a day. The crowns from the masts erected in the Mall
fetched i each; Abbey stools 255. The succession of Royal events,
the Jubilee, Accession of King Edward VIII, Abdication, and
Coronation had also caused a boom in philately. On the day of the
Abdication, the stocks of Edward VIII stamps were completely
sold out in many post offices. By the end of 1937 Jubilee stamps of
Great Britain and the Empire were fetching 20 a set. Coronation
stamps were equally popular, and not only among stamp-collectors
ordinary people wanted them as souvenirs. The commonest atti
tude to the Coronation was to regard it as a solemn historical
pageant, to be seen and stored in the memory: not an enjoyable
entertainment but a dividing line between two periods for most
people still liked to think of periods in terms of Bangs reigns. They
were not far out. Behind lay nearly nineteen years of difficult peace
time development; ahead lay the two crisis years that preceded the
new war. There was no factious or disloyal manifestation any
where in the British Commonwealth of Nations except in Ireland:
one was made at Dublin by the Irish Republican Army, the recal
citrant rump of the old I.R.A., which had repudiated the com
promises of Cosgrave and de Valera with the British authorities
and persisted in demanding complete Republican independence for
Ireland. On Coronation Day the I.R.A. blew up the statue of
George II, as a symbolic act.
On the day after the Coronation there was a State Banquet at
the Palace, more cheering crowds outside, another balcony appear
ance. On May ipth a drive to the Guildhall for lunch with the
Lord Mayor of London. Later in the month, a review of the Fleet
at Spithead, at which eighteen foreign nations were represented by
their warships. The King sailed around the Fleet in his yacht on a
THREE KINGS IN ONE YEAR 359
tour of inspection and boarded the flagship, where he sent out an
order for the main brace to be spliced*. This occasion was remark
able for a commentary on the night-time illuminations of the Fleet
by the B.B.C. The commentator, who was himself a naval officer,
began to speak at 10.45, He was so overcome by emotion and the
sudden dizzying effect of the night air after drinking the King s
health below, that all he could say was: The Fleet s lit up. ... I
mean with fairy lights. . . . When I say lit up, I mean outlined
with tiny lights. . . .* When the lights of the Fleet went out he
added incoherently: *Now the whole ruddy Fleet is gone. . . .
Nothing between me but sea and sky. . . . Nothing between me
but sea and sky. . . . The B.B.C. faded him out, and on the next
day published the laconic announcement that the commentary had
proved unsatisfactory. The newspapers made as much as they could
of the incident in a guarded way.
The Coronation festivities in country villages were celebrated
in traditional style. A Coronation Committee would usually be
chosen at a parish meeting and convened in the parlour of the
principal inn. Often, a commentator noted, there was a vacant
chair at the top of the long oak table. c ln former days this would
have been awaiting the Squire; to-day all too frequently the big
house stands empty. The prime mover now is the resident clergy
man or doctor, or the senior retired officer of the neighbourhood/
At one typical village the proposals debated were: a fancy-dress
procession, the planting of a tree, a May Queen, fireworks, etc. It
was first decided to plant a tree in the centre of the Village Green.
The gardener to die local retired Colonel then wrote to the Vicar
as Chairman of the Committee:
Reverend Sir:
To plant a tree at the Coronation of our King and Queen in
May is very pathetic, as it is the wrong time of year to plant trees.
Yours obediently,
JOHN BROWN, MR.
The Committee ignored the letter but decided to ask permission
for the planting from the Parish Council; which after deliberation
reported that it could find no tide deeds to the Green it belonged
to the village only by immemorial tradition and refused to do
360 THREE KINGS IN ONE YEAR
anything out of order on so solemn an occasion! No tree was there
fore planted. However, a May Queen was chosen from among the
village schoolgirls, and a Ladies Committee appointed to discuss
the material and length of the train of her dress and those of the
Maids of Honour. Someone remembered that the old maypole
from the 1911 Coronation was still lying about in the tithe barn.
It was hauled out and re-erected in the middle of the Green, tide
deeds or none. The children were taught to dance round it, holding
red, white, and blue ribbons, plaiting them as they danced to the
tune of Come, Lassies and Lads! The British Legion of ex-Service-
men provided marshals, wearing red silk sashes, for the festivities
and undertook to give, as a main feature of the day, a tableau: The
Army down the Ages . The Procession, headed by the May Queen,
would include trade turn-outs, decorated perambulators, the Silver
Band. Also it was arranged that the local bus-proprietor, in one of
his father s great box-coats flung wide, a beaver hat, top-boots, and
a Union Jack waistcoat, would drive, as John Bull, a wagonette-
party dressed symbolically as the League of Nations . A prize was
also offered for the best decorated house.
On Coronation morning an ambitious peal was rung on the
church bells and most of the village went to church. The local
brewery company had brewed a specially strong Coronation ale
which was drunk to the King s and Queen s health after the service,
with three hearty cheers led by the vicar. Then the Maypole
Dance, and the tableau. In the afternoon there were village sports:
these included a race for veterans handicapped according to their
age, a Band race in which the performers had to play their instru
ments as they ran, a fifty-yards race for children under seven, a
tug-of-war between married and single. A Tip-and-run cricket
match was also played, and a free repast provided for all the chil
dren in a great marquee, with seed-cake, buns, and tea out of
Coronation mugs. In the evening, a torch-light procession, fire
works, and a great bonfire on the church hill. The men of the vil
lage, perfectly sober on all other occasions, were by now rolling
drunk under the renewed influence of the Coronation ale, but
showed this only in their extraordinary friendliness and in their
insistence on telling the same story again and again.
After the Coronation festivities the King followed the normal
routine of constitutional monarchs, his official appearances being
THREE KINGS IN ONE YEAR 361
limited to the inspection of factories, regiments, camps and hospi
tals, and opening new buildings. But in July 1938, with the Queen,
he paid a week s State visit to Paris, which was celebrated in French
and British newspapers as a sign of close Franco-British co-opera
tion. In March 1939 President Lebrun and his wife returned the
visit, and spent some festive days in London. Among other func
tions they attended a grand gala performance at the Royal Opera
House at Covent Garden. A B.B.C. commentator on this event
the daughter-in-law of an ex-Lord Mayor of London drew atten
tion to Mme Lebrun s homely appearance by saying enthusiasti
cally that she did not look a bit out of place! 3 In May 1939 began
the six weeks Royal tour of Canada, which included a brief visit
to Washington and to New York. Canadian loyalty was stirred by
the cheerful assiduity of the King and Queen in attending the
numerous public functions arranged for them, and American pride
and curiosity tickled to welcome the first British King to set foot
in the New World. The French and Canadian and American visits
proved the King s capacity to play the public role of his father
without apparent impatience; but it was the Queen who roused the
crowd s greatest admiration. In Paris and in Washington she was
proclaimed charming, graceful, and regally dressed; and that she
could make a simple, moving speech she showed at the launching
of the liner Queen Elizabeth at Glasgow on September lyth, the
day before the Munich conference was announced.
The Kong and Queen and the Princesses were made a symbol of
simple, well-regulated family life. As used in the Royal Nursery
was a sure-selling recommendation for teething biscuits, baby soap,
perambulator accessories, and the like. The King s genuine interest
in Boy Scouts was also approved. The most popular act that the
Royal Family ever performed was c Under the Spreading Chestnut
Tree , a song with gestures, at the Duke of York s Camp for Boys.
It was recorded on a news reel. The King wore an open-necked
shirt, the Queen had no hat on and the two Princesses were dressed
in simple blouses and skirts. The King, as song leader, spread out
his hands for spreading , touched his chest for chest and his head
for nut , and branched his arms for tree . It was fine!
The Duke of Windsor came back into the news after the Coro
nation. His departure from Austria to join Mrs. Simpson in France
as soon as her decree nisi was made absolute, and their quiet wed-
3&2 THREE KINGS IN ONE YEAR
ding at Cande on the 3rd June 1937, were both decently featured
in the popular Press, though The Times and the Daily Telegraph
almost ignored them. Official news-sources in England during the
next three years continued to divert public attention from the
Duke and Duchess: the vehemence of several books on the subject
of the Abdication violently pro-Duke, anti-Baldwin, and anti-
Church suggested this as a wise course. Compton Mackenzie, the
novelist and Scottish Nationalist, was a leading King s Friend: he
took up the cause of the King across the Water with Jacobite in
tensity. As late as May 1939 the B.B.C. refused to transmit the
Duke s speech at Verdun, which was therefore broadcast only to
the United States; and about the same time a penny magazine was
hawked in the London streets by the Octavian Society, founded to
combat all ungenerous treatment of the Duke of Windsor and to
assure fit recognition of his long and able service to the British
peoples .
The Duke, however, almost invited ungenerous treatment. He
decided to study social services in Germany and in the United
States, and unfortunately chose to visit Germany first and meet
Hitler in person. This meeting was misunderstood, and the Duke
accused of having Nazi sympathies. The select Press contented
itself with describing his visit as ill-advised but contrived to imply
^that Britain was lucky to be rid of a King who was now showing
totalitarian leanings. Some American newspapers expressed this
view openly and in strong terms. They were indignant not only
that the Duke had gone first to Germany but that one of his chief
American friends and advisers was the exponent of an unpopular
factory speed-up system. Warned that he would have a bad recep
tion, the Duke cancelled his American visit, and abandoned all
efforts to Eve a helpful public life. He passed the next years quietly
and was seldom in the news even as a minor mention. The current
rumour was that he would return to England only if his wife were
granted the title of Royal Highness.
Perhaps the most curiously old-fashioned feature of the Windsor
affair was the puritanical attitude to divorce which it revealed to
be still widespread in Britain. This antagonism was aroused again
in the summer of 1937, when A. P. Herbert, the novelist, drama
tist, Punch jokester, and now a member of Parliament for Oxford
University, succeeded in having passed what began as a most pro-
THREE KINGS IN ONE YEAR 363
gresave Divorce Bill. There was so much opposition in both
Houses to this assault on the sanctity of wedlock* that in the end
it was doubtful whether the Bill as amended had been worth the
trouble. Herbert had publicized his intentions beforehand in a best-
selling novel, Holy Deadlock, which told of an ill-assorted couple s
miserable experiences in trying to get unmarried. However, divorce
for desertion was simplified, though one was only entitled to sue
after three years of married life; and divorce after three years, also,
where one s spouse was certified as incurably insane.
In Coronation year die Queen s taste was allowed to rule fash
ion: which implied feminine grace in colour, line, and style . The
Queen had had a good old-fashioned Scottish upbringing, and was
almost as conservative in her tastes as Queen Mary. Evening skirts
were long and flowing, bodices becomingly moulded, and neck
lines cut low. Day frocks and suits were slim and neatly tailored.
Light powder-blue, the Queen s favourite colour, was loyally worn
and for those who could afford it there was plum-coloured velvet
trimmed with ermine. But as the next war drew nearer, so did the
end of the period -period it caught up with itself. Neo- Victorian-
ism in fashion had run from the 1850-60 crinoline forward to the
dress-styles of 1880-90. In the summer of 1938 the Duchess of
Kent, who had moved with her father in the advanced artistic
circles of Paris, and was always one stage ahead of Society, intro
duced the Edwardian mode. Frocks, suits, and hair-dressing styles
were influenced by it: at the end of the year an Edwardian coiffure
called The Bathtub Style was worn, evening dresses had Gibson
Girl silhouettes, and there were high-crowned, wide-brimmed hats
and tiny top knots. But while fashionable women were whipping
time on its second lamp over the old course and leaving their rivals
ten years behindhand in a week, there could no longer be a angle
fashion. Almost anything was worn, from the simply modern to
the elaborately fancy-dress. Everyone had quite different styles
for successive days of the week; one evening a flowing, looped and
knotted creation, and the next, perhaps, an informal print-frock in
the Bali style. (Bali, in the Dutch East Indies, had recently become
fashionable for its dances, music, clothes, climate, and beautiful
girls. Rich British and Americans flocked there and came back with
gaily coloured Bali-esque prints. Periodically certain islands exerted
such a fashionable spell. Capri had been popularized by Norman
364 THREE KINGS IN ONE YEAR
Douglas s South Wind in the early Twenties, the Balearics by the
lowness of the peseta in 1932-3. But when the Balearics could no
longer be visited because of the Spanish War, or Capri because of
the Mediterranean Crisis, Bali had its day. For the rich it had the
advantage of being so far away from Europe that the middle-class
tourist and the hungry painter could never afford to overrun it.)
Then there were trousers. When a woman got into slacks now,
it was not a sign of masculinity or bravado: it was merely to show
that she was off duty for the moment, so far as fashion was con
cerned. Slacks had been an Army term for trousers worn off duty
instead of breeches or kilt. Most younger women had a pair or
two, and the innovation evoked strangely little protest in any
quarter. The newspaper printed benign warnings to outsize women
that trousers did not suit their figures; but otherwise made no fuss.
The Church withheld comment.
Women s shoes, which all these years had been the one fairly
stable element in dress, had now also gone a little queer. The
brightly coloured canvas and string sandal of 1935 and the abruptly
square-toed walking shoe of 1936 were followed by a high-heeled
fancy shoe with cut-away toe, and a wedge-heeled streamlined
type. All these could be worn in town. At the very end of the
period shoe-madness was concentrated in the heels: anything went,
from monumental scrolls to golf -tees.
Royal influence on men s fashions was not so marked as on
women s. The Duke of Windsor, when Prince of Wales, had popu
larized many unconventional modes shorts, slacks, and open-
necked shirts, for instance and had once shocked the Navy by
going hatless aboard a warship which made it impossible for him
to acknowledge the salute due to his rank. But King George VI,
though he dressed well, was no arbiter elegantiarum. At the Royal
Command Variety Show in 1938, he wore black patent-leather
Oxford brogues with formal evening dress; but it was not clear
whether he was trying to set a new fashion or whether his valet
had handed him the wrong pair of shoes by mistake perhaps the
latter, for he did not repeat the experiment.
However, Anthony Eden, the Foreign Secretary, had reintro-
duced the black Homburg hat, known as the Eden in Savile Row
and as the Tord Eden in Amsterdam and the white linen waist
coat worn with a lounge suit. Men s hats, on the whole, had become
THREE KINGS IN ONE YEAR 365
less formal: provincial clerks still wore their bowlers and working-
men their caps, but more and more London business men and
salesmen were wearing soft-brimmed, variously coloured Hom-
burgs with unbound edges. Low-crowned pork-pie hats were in
fashion again and green Tyrolese hats, introduced by the Duke of
Windsor, with feathers and cord bands instead of ribbon. Eden s
moustache and those of such film stars as Ronald Colman, William
Powell, and Clark Gable were imitated: die new moustache was
small, short and carefully cut, sometimes slightly curved above the
lip at either end, sometimes making a thin straight line.
New materials were being used for men s trousers sackcloth
for the summer and corduroy for the winter. Corduroys had hith-
erto been reserved for artists and working-men; but most working-
men in fact wore blue overalls over ordinary clothes. Trousers
were cut close to the hips so as to stay up without braces or belt.
Striped, checked and tartan shirts, in wool, cotton and linen had
ceased to be merely holiday wear, and could be seen in every go-
ahead City office. Overcoats, like hats and shirts, had become less
formal; the single-breasted, loose-fitting Raglan was equally for
town or country use. Elegant and moustached young men adopted
an Army habit of carrying silk handkerchiefs tucked into their
sleeves, one end carefully showing. Ties, too, had changed: the
knitted silk kind had gone and plain bright colours were worn in
wool, rayon and tussore as well as in silk. As in the United States,
walking-sticks were no longer carried, except rough, knobbly ones
for country use; neatly folded umbrellas had taken their place.
Spats had completely gone. Greekish sandals for home and coun
try wear were not thought eccentric. Yet in spite of these many
small changes, most of them towards informality and comfort,
male dress remained the same in essentials; the experiments made
in the Twenties to devise completely new fashions for Western
man had long since been abandoned.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Keeping Fit and Doing the Lambeth Walk
In 1934 the Press was agitating about the number of casualties on
the roads due to car-accidents. For five years the death roll had
averaged 7,000, and there had also been about 100,000 more or less
seriously injured. Cottages near dangerous country cross-roads be
came unofficial dressing-stations without pay or endowment f or
sometimes dozens of cases in a single holiday season. Saturday and
Sunday evenings when cars from London and other big cities
were hurrying home in an unbroken stream, trying to overtake one
another on tricky, tortuous roads and the work-day rush-hour in
Town on foggy weather were the bloodiest times. There were also
so many deaths, especially in tram-served areas, among children
who had to cross main roads on their way to school that in some
districts the parents went on strike: they would keep their children
at home until the local Council either provided a school on the
nearer side of the road, organized convoys for the crossing, or built
overhead pedestrian bridges. The general use of traffic lights at
main street-crossings had done little to cut down the casualty list.
That year the Ministry of Transport undertook a campaign to
make the roads safer. New road-signs were introduced in January:
Roundabout , Major Road Ahead , and One- Way Street . Round
abouts were intended to prevent crashes and jams at traffic junc
tions, and one-way streets to avoid congestion in narrow areas.
Oliver Stanley, then Minister of Transport, deplored road-deaths
as a hideous and growing blot on our national life , and announced
that the Ministry had further plans for traffic control. Authorized
pedestrian crossings, traffic lanes, and speed-limits were to be intro
duced. Cyclists would have to use more visible rear-reflectors, and
the surfaces of the roads were to be improved. In the course of
1934, however, Stanley was replaced as Minister by Leslie Hore-
366
KEEPING FIT AND DOING THE LAMBETH WALK 367
Belisha, and it was he who gave his name to the orange beacons
that thereafter marked street-crossings, and to the steel-studded
lines on the roadway that connected them. He also inaugurated
silence-zones in London after 11.30 at night, in which headlight
flashes were to be used as signals instead of hooting. They were
such a success that soon all night-hooting was forbidden. It was
during this period that the Anti-Noise League was active protest
ing continually against electric road-drills, until more effective
silencers were devised for them. As a result of Belisha s efforts, a
thirty-miles-an-hour speed-limit was enforced in built-up areas
elsewhere there was now no speed-limit, but only a regulation
against driving to the public danger . The dimming of headlights
as cars passed one another, and the use of windscreen wipers and
unsplinterable glass for windscreens became obligatory. More re
markable still, motorists were compelled to take driving tests before
they were allowed to drive a car alone. Previously anyone had
been allowed to get a licence, jump into a car and drive off without
any experience whatever. But in fairness to the motorist jay
walking a term borrowed from the U.S.A. in 1927, meaning
careless pedestrianism became a criminal offence. Next came
the courtesy cops policemen in cars with orders to warn drivers
politely but firmly of any minor infringement of the rules of die
road. They had microphones fitted in their cars, and the hollow
courteous boom of their warnings reverberated down hundreds of
yards of road. A courtesy cop once shouted to an erring woman
driver through a microphone: Will the lady m the grey Ford V8
kindly pull m to the left of the road? The woman in the Ford V8
accelerated. The constable repeated: Speaking to the lady in the
grey Ford V8. Will she be good enough, please, to pull m to the
left of the road.* The woman-driver tried to put a heavy lorry be
tween her and her pursuers. Will the young lady in the Ford V8
kindly oblige us, please, by pulling in to the left of the road? 9 The
woman-driver shot across a major road, dodging a stream of fast
traffic, and the courtesy cop, forgetting that his microphone was
still in action, remarked in a terrific aside: No<w for Christ Jesus
sake, what the bloody hell <will the old co*w do neoct?
These reforms did not pass without criticism. The Spectator
objected to the Belisha beacons because they gave London the air
of being prepared for a fifth-rate carnival many were deliber-
368 KEEPING FIT AND DOING THE LAMBETH WALK
ately destroyed by revellers and motorists wrote angry letters to
the Press when they were fined for only slightly exceeding the new
speed-limit. But on the whole Hore-Belisha earned high praise, for
by the end of the year there was a marked drop in the number of
road-accidents in spite of the increase in the number of cars on the
road. Beacons, pedestrian crossings, speed-limits, road-signs, and
roundabouts made the public more traffic-conscious, and so more
careful: it was really a success for judicious advertising. But the
death-rate did not thereafter fall below 6,500. The gross casualties
for the period were some 120,000 killed (equal to the strength of
the original British Expeditionary Force to France) and some
1,500,000 who in wartime would have been dignified with a men
tion in the casualty list as wounded .
Besides Belisha beacons, only one noticeable new change had
brightened the appearance of towns; that was Neon signs glass
tubes containing incandescent neon gas. These allowed night adver
tisements, hitherto composed of rows of separate electric bulbs, to
be designed in continuous coloured lines, and gave some streets the
air not of a fifth-rate but a first-rate carnival. The usual incidental
changes were going on: more and more new blocks of flats in Port
land stone and red brick, more luxury cinemas, increased slum-
clearance. In the outskirts, by-pass roads were being built to enable
motorists to avoid congested traffic areas. Most of these were very
soon lined with rows of suburban villas and shops, alternated with
filling-stations, snack-bars, and road-houses . Road-houses were
large elaborate inns which provided meals, drinks, dancing, a
night s lodging and no awkward questions asked, garage accommo
dation and, in summer, tennis, dancing, and even swimming. They
were very popular around London, and especially on the Great
West Road, where every few miles huge notices invited you in to
Swim, Dine, and Dance 7 . One or two of them had a reputation of
being bagnios in the Italian sense.
More than ever in the Thirties middle-class people went abroad
for their holidays; either on cruises or on the cut-rate European
tours that the many travel agency services were offering: Scandi
navia, the Danube countries, Holland, Dalmatia, even North
Africa, were added to the list of holiday countries. Nor did dislike
of Hitler greatly affect tourist traffic in Germany, except during
the Czech crisis, or of Mussolini in Italy, except during the Sane-
KEEPING FIT AND DOING THE LAMBETH WALK 369
tions period- and the tourist-mark and the tourist-lira* were
tempting. Most working-class families spent their short annual
holiday at seaside resorts at home but occasionally crossed die
Channel for a day at Calais, Dieppe or Ostend, the passport regu
lations being waived. Visits to the seaside were being made easier
for them by a movement for holidays with pay*. The Amalga
mated Engineering Union in July 1937 arranged for its members
to have a fortnight s holiday each year with pay. All engineering
firms federated to the Union were to inaugurate holiday funds into
which one-fifth of the value of each week s wages would be paid.
Similar systems were introduced in other industries, but by no
means all.
In the Thirties holiday camps on the American model came in.
These were riverside or seaside establishments which combined the
healthy pleasures of camping and aquatic sports with the advan
tages of a permanently organized community centre. The campers,
who were chiefly shop-girls and salesmen, lived in wooden huts
and had meals provided for them. Everything was organized by
paid staffs: games, bathing, walks, dancing, and community sing
ing. The camps were usually sited near fun-fairs and sometimes
owned by the fun-fair proprietors themselves. Holiday camps were
also organized for the serious-minded: Left camps, where people
spent half their time in political argument; music camps, attended
only by musicians; drama camps, where amateur actors got to
gether to give open-air plays. The routine of the music camps was
something of this sort. At daybreak physical jerks; then breakfast
and cleaning up the camp; then members retired to different cor
ners to practise on their instruments alone or in small groups. After
lunch came organized games or an organized walk. Finally a tea-
supper, and to conclude the day an impromptu concert in the twi
light. This was typical of the health-and-culture movement.
Slimming had developed into Keeping Fit . The Times in
November 1936 had urged that c a great national effort to improve
the physique of the nation should be undertaken. King Edward
VIII was cited as an example of a truly *fit man. To help working-
class boys to keep fit a fund was started in memory of King George
V to provide them with playing fields. Women were expected to
join the League of Health and Beauty, which organized classes in
physical exercise. No special classes were provided for men, it being
370 KEEPING FIT AND DOING THE LAMBETH WALK
assumed that most of them did take exercise. Cabinet Ministers
made speeches in favour of fitness. But though Neville Chamber
lain fished, Sir Samuel Hoare skated and some junior Ministers
even occasionally hunted, none of them offered to perform such
total feats as jumping over fixed bayonets, which Mussolini was
enjoining on his Ministers. The early nineteenth-century origin of
the phrase Keep fit was a military one with the words for service
understood: this was how The Times had intended it. Only in the
Thirties could the Keep Fit movement have come into being with
out exciting mocking laughter from the "intelligentsia or suburban
Left. But none went up. Keeping fit was as serious a problem as
any other: one might not practise it, but at least one did not joke
about it. The later Thirties were indeed no joking period. The
current jokes were set to Victorian or Regency patterns: Knock-
Knock, Who s There? and She was only a Plumber s (Gardener s,
Chauffeur s, Clergyman s, etc.) daughter , were based on the old-
fashioned pun. Little Audrey laughed and laughed was a series in
the ceremonious Joe Miller vein. In 1937 there was a painstaking
revival of the Limerick the Evening Standard gave substantial
weekly prizes to the best Holiday Limerick.
Working men could not afford to play golf, tennis, squash-
rackets or badminton in their leisure time, or go motoring as did
members of the middle and upper class. The younger ones, espe
cially those with girls, went to the pictures or public baths, or
cycling tandem cycling was popular or hiking; the older ones,
and those without girls or allotments, usually went to pubs, or to
football matches and greyhound races. But gambling was a chief
distraction of both older and younger.
Two new gambling schemes were launched in the Thirties, de
signed especially for stay-at-home gamblers. First came the Irish
Sweepstake, started in Dublin in 1930 by an ex-bookmaker and an
ex-politician; they persuaded the Irish Government to sanction it
on condition that they gave a large part of the proceeds to impover
ished Irish hospitals. The first race on which the sweepstake was run
was the Manchester Handicap, but in 193 1 it was extended to three
races: the Grand National, the Derby, and the Cesarewitch. Public
lotteries were forbidden in England (though clubs legitimately or
ganized sweepstakes among members), but the British postal author
ities could not prevent people from buying tickets in Dublin with-
KEEPING FIT AND DOING THE LAMBETH WALK 371
out imposing a total censorship on the mail, which they hesitated
to do. Hundreds of thousands of tickets were therefore sold to
British and American gamblers, and smart publicity soon made the
sweepstake the second greatest industry in Ireland only Guin-
ness s Brewery had a larger pay-roll. The huge drum, which mixed
the tickets for the draw, stood in the Plaza Cinema hall in Dublin
and became one of Ireland s sightseeing attractions for tourists.
Three times a year the draw was held and the prettiest nurses in
Dublin picked the winning tickets out of the drum s portholes. In
the course of ten years the sweepstake collected over 60,000,000
of which it gave 14,000,000 to the Irish hospitals, and almost
200,000 a year to the Irish Government in taxes. Only the war
brought an end to the organization. The British Government was
constantly urged by the Press to keep this good money in the
country by reintroducing State lotteries, which had been such use
ful money-makers in Georgian times, or at least to permit British
hospitals to finance themselves in the same way as the Irish ones
most British hospitals, being supported by voluntary subscriptions,
were in continuous financial difficulty. But the politicians did not
wish to antagonize the Churches, especially the Nonconformist
Church; also the British Medical Association was thoroughly set
against State control of the hospitals and mistrustful of the Mm-
istry of Health. To indulge the medical profession with a monopoly
of public sweepstakes would stiffen them in their intransigeance.
No action was taken.
The other gambling scheme, a more purely working-class one,
was the Football Pools. They grew in popularity at the same time
as the Irish Sweepstake, and in the last three or four years of the
Peace they overtook it. In the Pools, lists were given of football
matches to be played, and correct forecasts of the results won
enormous prizes. Since correct forecasts, though largely a matter
of luck, could be represented as arrived at by studying the form of
the teams engaged, die Gaming Act did not apply to the Pools. The
charges for entering the competitions varied from a shilling to a
penny. The money subscribed to each Pool was lumped together,
deductions were made for expenses and profits, and what was left
was divided among the winners. On one ocasion as much as i 3,000
was won in a penny Pool, the winner claiming that it was his first
attempt. Although such hauls wore rare, the possibility of winning
372 KEEPING FIT AND DOING THE LAMBETH WALK
one attracted an enormous public. The Pools promoters saw that
the public got what it wanted by employing agents in almost every
town, village, factory, and workshop: these distributed coupons
and collected entrance fees and were paid about 25 per cent of
their gross takings. But most of the business was done directly
through the post, and on Mondays and Tuesdays, when the new
week s coupons were delivered, extra postmen had to be employed
in many working-class districts. A tremendous advertising cam
paign in Sunday newspapers and on the radio from Luxemburg,
Normandie, and Poste Parisien helped to put the Pools over. Their
growth was phenomenal: during the football season of 1934-5 they
took a weekly average of 700,000. The season s total could not
have been less than 20,000,000, and this figure was doubled in
1936. Responsible people began to feel worried by the great profits
made by the Pools promoters, and by the waste of public purchas
ing power which the success of Pools gambling implied. Legisla
tion on the subject was being considered as the period ended.
Most pubs in England were divided into public bars and saloons,
the saloons being patronized by people willing to pay an extra half
penny a pint on beer for enjoying more select company and slightly
more comfortable furnishings than in the public bars. The public
bars were often bare and dirty, and usually their only ornament,
besides advertisements, was a dart-board, not to be found in the
saloons. Darts had therefore remained almost entirely a working-
class game, only occasionally indulged in by middle-class commer
cial travellers, until in the middle Thirties it was taken up by Left
undergraduates, slumming in search of actuality in public bars.
Advanced, Left- Wing gourmet clubs in London began to instal
dartboards on their premises; soon the game spread to non-political
society. In 1937 a burglar was caught in one of the most lavishly
appointed West End flats, making himself at home with beer and
darts. Darts, with beer and sausages, became as upper class as
bridge, with whisky and pdte de foie gras sandwiches. This upper-
class incursion into low-life was Victorian too. As Mr. Mount-
chesney had said in Disraeli s Sybil: 1 rather like bad wine; one
gets so bored with good wine. Dartboards were then made in
refined colours, and with special unpierceable backcloths that could
be attached to any drawing-room wall; and elm wood gave place
to closely packed bristle. More boards and darts were sold in 1937
KEEPING FIT AND DOING THE LAMBETH WALK 373
than in any year since the game began, and manufacturers com
plained that they had difficulty in keeping up with orders espe
cially when photographs were published in die Press which showed
the Queen playing the game and giving the King a bearing.
The indoor game of Monopoly was now to the middle classes
what Mah-Jong had been: it was first played in the United States
in the depths of die Depression by Wall-Street brokers with time
on their hands, and exported to the British Stock Exchange. Mon
opoly was not unlike the pre-war Tit*, which had been based on
bull and bear dealings in the Chicago wheat-pit; and consisted of
mock deals in real estate, each player s aim being to buy up all the
estate on the board and secure a monopoly.
Great Britain still relied almost wholly on America for her
popular music and dances. Jazz since the Depression had devel
oped two new forms: swing and crooning. The most celebrated
crooner was Bing Crosby, who first sang in that way because of a
defect in his vocal chords. For a time every popular band, in Britain
as well as the United States, was expected to keep a crooner, who
huddled up to the microphone, swaying and twisting his body
voluptuously, tapping his feet, grimacing, and breathing out his
suppressed syrupy wail. Bands with vocalists also often included
tap-dancers and showgirls who put on an act during play. Music
of this kind reached the wider public chiefly by way of the films.
There were no British swing bands of any worth but occasionally
famous coloured band-leaders, like Louis Armstrong and Duke
Ellington, made a European tour. Swing was therefore best known
through gramophone records. (Gramophones had maintained their
popularity and were now often combined with wireless sets in vast,
square, sideboard-like radiograms, built of ornamental woods.)
Swing bands specialized in trumpets, clarinets and drums, the saxo
phone being no longer the star instrument. They were teams of
virtuosos, each of whom had his solo turn to play in the course of
every piece. The result was a roughly fugue-like movement, the
main theme constantly recurring in different forms. Extempore
playing by the soloists was one of the features of swing: entirely
new things could happen each time a piece was performed. True
swing was music to be listened to as much as danced to: it was a
fine product of Jewish sweet-passion, negro relish of living and the
stimulating climate of New York City. If there were lyrics to it,
374 KEEPING FIT AND DOING THE LAMBETH WALK
they were often noises integrated into the general sound rather
than words with sentimental meanings.
British followers of true swing entered seriously into its spirit,
showing for certain bands the intense enthusiasm of Spanish aficio-
Tiados for particular bull-fighters, and using the complete swing
technical vocabulary. The latest novelty to come over from the
United States at the end of the period was swung popular classics :
for instance, the Shakespearian It was a Lover and his Lass , and,
to the disgust of all patriotic Scots, Loch Lomond . The wider
public heard only commercial swing, which lacked its creative
spirit and its technical skill. The B.B.C. did not dare maintain a
permanent band, nor would any have been found hardy enough
to perform its exuberant feats in the staid soundproof halls of
Broadcasting House, or desperate enough to put itself under the
moral tutelage of the B.B.C. Council. Popular music in Great Britain
was, in fact, not taken passionately, but expected to be either senti
mental or humorous. Bands, especially in the north, played up to
this view by dressing in extravagant uniforms or rigging themselves
out as pierrots or pirates.
By the Thirties, radio had created new domestic habits. Regular
seasons of symphony concerts, frequent recitals by prominent musi
cians, the annual proms , and talks by such speakers as Sir Waif ord
Davies, Scott Goddard, and Dr. Malcolm Sargent trained the
nation to appreciate educated as well as popular music; so that
when This Symphony Business , a series in which a philistine
grudgingly allowed himself to be enlightened by a serious musi
cian, was broadcast in 1939, hundreds of people wrote to say that
they postponed, or interrupted, their midday meal on Sunday to
listen to it. In the later Thirties, twelve-instalment serial plays, such
as The Count of Monte Cristo, Les Miserable*, and The Cloister
and the Hearth were regularly broadcast on Sundays; the B.B.C.
then learned that in thousands of homes week-end plans were
altered to allow listeners to get near a radio-set when the perform
ances were on. In certain cases these performances coincided with
Evensong, and a clergyman complained to the Radio Times that
not only was his congregation severely depleted, but that he him
self regretfully missed every other instalment of the current serial
through taking Evensong on alternate Sundays. Regular Saturday
KEEPING FIT AND DOING THE LAMBETH WALK 375
Music Hall 7 had for years brought a large number of men and
women home early from the pubs; but this was nothing to the
effect in the late Thirties of the popular Band Wagon* programme
at 8.15 on Wednesday evenings. Cinema and theatre managers
found that their Wednesday evening receipts fell in some cases by
as much as one-third. Women s Institutes, Evening Classes, Clubs,
Study Circles, that normally met on Wednesdays were forced to
change their day to Tuesday or Thursday. Band Wagon Night
became one on which outside social engagements were refused.
The chief catch-phrase of the show, I thank you pronounced in
a heavily nasal manner swept the country for a year. In trains,
buses, and trams on Thursday mornings those who had been unfor
tunate enough to miss the previous evening s performance eagerly
pressed for details from those who had not.
The practice of Group Listening , started by the B.B.C. in the
cause of adult education, grew steadily under the surveillance of
Local Education Authorities. The B.B.C. itself appointed Educa
tion Officers in various parts of the country whose duty it was to
organize Discussion Groups to assemble and listen to the various
broadcast series. Many of these groups were quite large assemblies
in Public Libraries, Institutes, or Church Halls, but the majority
consisted of a few friends meeting in private houses. Listening
attentively to particular programmes, instead of merely using radio
as a noisy background for domestic life, became a natural habit;
though small children complained that they could not get their
homework done for the noise, and large families constantly quar
relled when different members wanted to listen to different pro
grammes given simultaneously. The B.B.C. s official journal, the
Radio Times, had reached a circulation of nearly three million
copies weekly by the end of the period.
The suspicion of the newspaper proprietors that the BJJ,C.
damaged their interests was understandable. Early in its history the
B.B.C. agreed with them that, in order not to discourage business
people from buying morning or evening papers, it would not
broadcast news between midnight and 6 p.m.; nor would it broad
cast running commentaries on sporting events. Thus one heard
the hoofs of the Derby race-horses pounding past Tattenham
Corner, the shouts of the crowd and the yelling of bookmakers,
376 KEEPING FIT AND DOING THE LAMBETH WALK
but not the result of the race one had to wait for the evening
papers for that. When the B.B.C. became a public corporation in
1927, this ruling was relaxed and a few news commentaries were
allowed. These gradually increased, until by 1939 practically every
event of importance was covered by commentators. But news was
still restricted to the 6 p.m. limit, except in circumstances of
national importance. The rule, for example, was broken in the case
of the crashing of the RIOI, because there were no Sunday evening
papers to be considered; when King George V died; and at the
height of the September crisis in 1939.
The entertainment world had the same jealousy of the B.B.C.
as the Press. There was a long-standing conflict over the annual
broadcast of the Royal Command Variety performance, which
emptied music-halls, theatres, and cinemas afl over the country.
The B.B.Q eventually undertook to pay a large sum to charity in
return for the right to broadcast the show, but this was robbing
Peter to pay Paul, for houses of entertainment still continued to be
half -empty on Royal Command nights. In 1938 the B.B.C. was
forced to abandon the broadcast.
In many cases, however, broadcasting proved itself the ally
rather than the enemy of the Stage. Theatre managers were de
lighted when the B.B.C. took to broadcasting fortnightly half -hour
excerpts from their shows, most of which benefited by this gratui
tous form of trailer . Many people in the provinces selected the
plays they wished to see on short visits to London entirely on the
merits of these broadcasts. The most notable instance of the B.B.C.
assistance to the Stage was when it came to the rescue of Me and
My Girl , the Christmas show at the Chelsea Palace, in 1937. This
was on the point of closing down after a short run, when a broad
cast from the theatre commended it to the attention of some mil
lions of listeners. The broadcast contained The Lambeth Walk ,
sung by Lupino Lane in the character of a Lambeth native who
had inherited an earldom. Lambeth retained the Victorian tradition
of cheerful Cockney behaviour, at music-halls, dance-halls, pubs,
and boxing shows, that had vanished elsewhere in London; so even
in high Society the new Earl preserved his Lambeth ways and at a
high-class dinner-party started doing the Lambeth Walk , with
such infectious gaiety that all the titled guests joined in. The origi
nal words were:
KEEPING FIT AND DOING THE LAMBETH WALK 377
Any time you re Lambeth way,
Any evening, any day,
You ll find us all doin the Lambeth Walk.
Ev ry little Lambeth gal
With her little Lambeth pal,
You ll find em all doin the Lambeth Walk.
Ev rything free and easy,
Do as you darn well pleasey,
Why don t you make your way there,
Go there, stay there,
Once you get down Lambeth way,
Ev ry evening, ev ry day,
You ll find yourself doin the Lambeth Walk.
The tune was written by the composer of All the King s Horses ,
made famous by Cicely Courtneidge s rendering in the early
Thirties.
The broadcast turned "Me and My Gal into one of the greatest
successes of the period, and a dance was at once invented to suit
the song. It included a jerky swagger, the thumbs-up 1 gesture, and
the hand-spreading Jewish Oi! The dance version of the Lambeth
Walk swept the country, the B.B.C. plugging it proudly.
More copies of the song were sold than of any other since Yes,
We Have No Bananas*. It provided a welcome change from the
eternal foxtrots, rumbas, and tangos, and even went down well in
the United States, which needed a sedative after the Big Apple .
Journalists in Czechoslovakia in September 1938 reported that die
Czechs were forgetting the crisis by doing the Lambeth Walk. In
England its respectability was sealed when the Duke and Duchess
of Kent were reported to have danced it in spite of protests against
its vulgarity by the Blimps. ( Blimp was a contemptuous term for
every reactionary muddle-headed Conservative who feared a Red
Revolution at home more than national humiliation by the Totali
tarian Powers. Colonel Blimp in Low s Evening Standard cartoons
was a bald, fat, walrus-moustached old man, usually depicted
emerging from a Turkish bath with a towel round his middle, and
preluding some fatuous Diehard remark with *Gar, sir, Chamber
lain or Baldwin or Hitler or Mussolini is right! Low, who
joined the Evening Standard in 1927 was far more Left-minded
than the editorship, but so many people bought the paper only for
378 KEEPING FIT AND DOING THE LAMBETH WALK
his outrageous and beautifully drawn cartoons, that he could more
or less make his own terms.)
The Lambeth Walk had its imitations: there was a dance-hall
version of the Cockney song, Knees up, Mother Brown , the
words of which ran:
Knees up, Mother Brown,
Knees up, Mother Brown,
Under the table you must go,
Ee aye, ee aye, ee aye oh,
If we catch you bending
We ll turn you upside down,
Knees up, knees up, don t get the breeze up,
Knees up, Mother Brown. 5
Mother Brown never made the social grade; the lifting of skirts
that went with the dance-version was a little too much. But in
compliment to their Majesties Under the Spreading Chestnut Tree
was turned into a dance, an undistinguished foxtrot with formal
ized gestures, and was loyally and frequently performed.
The popularity of these cheerful, simple, miming dances began
to decline in 1939. Jitterbugging had then just come over from the
United States: this was an ecstatic mode of dancing to fast swing
music in which the two partners could perform absolutely any tap
or acrobatic feat they liked, provided they kept in time with each
other and with the music. It demanded a capacity for idle nervous
excess that the American climate might bestow, but not the Eng
lish. Jitterburg competitions were held in some working-class
dance-halls, but the fashion never ran wild in the Universities, as
in the United States, nor was it tried out in Mayfair. All-in wres
tling, however, which had long been practised in some British
working-class districts under the name of Free-style wrestling, was
widely popularized by American fashion. The savage eighteenth-
century nought barred tradition of the Staffordshire mines and the
Virginian mountains where wrestlers were permitted to blind
and castrate one another and bite off noses had been gradually
modified in both countries to the discouragement of actual mutila
tion; but c All-in still permitted blows and holds that were forbid-
dent in official boxing and wrestling codes. Its attraction lay not
KEEPING FIT AND DOING THE LAMBETH WALK 379
only in the savagery and skill, but also in the humour of the pro
ceedings. The crowd would cat-call blithely when the wrestlers
were pinned down and nearly choked; it enjoyed seeing the light
weight referee slung out of the ring or crushed between two closely
locked performers; and encouraged the performers themselves to
do psychological and dramatic clowning, of the sort that had
made Max Baer more popular with the American masses than with
strict lovers of boxing. All-in enjoyed the approval of Mayfair,
which imported East End wrestlers to perform at parties. Society
people attended Wrestling Qubs and the daughter of the British
Rajah of Sarawak put herself in the forefront of fashion by actually
marrying a leading all-in wrestler, as her sister had done a season
or two before by marrying a band-leader. But it was only a short
fashion: for general opinion in Britain considered c all-in no less
vulgar than it was brutal.
Ordinary boxing was a sport followed chiefly by the industrial
working class, though a few peers, social celebrities, and members
of the Royal Family would attend major contests. Newspapers
gave far less space to boxing news than to football, cricket, and
racing, and the general public became interested only when British
boxers made attempts at the World Heavyweight title, as Phil
Scott did in the Twenties and Tommy Farr in the Thirties both
unsuccessfully. Sometimes a foreign boxer s personality would
catch public attention. Jack Dempsey, for instance, was every small
boy s hero in the Twenties, as Joe Beckett was too, while he lasted.
Then the Italian giant, Primo Camera, came to England and caused
great excitement because of his huge bulk, huge appetite, huge feet,
and childlike disposition. For some reason or other, the lighter box
ing weights did not attract so much popular interest as the heavy;
though against the horizontal heavyweights of Tom Webster s
cartoons could be set the highly vertical light, bantam, feather, and
fly-weights from South Wales, the East End, Birmingham, and
Glasgow, who were a match for most American and Continental
champions. Kid Berg, a Londoner, who carried on the Jimmy
Wilde tradition of clean boxing and extraordinary courage, was
one of the few little men whose names made news.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Social Consciences
Scientists towards the close of the Thirties were less occupied
with the theoretical implications of their work, or with trying to
give it religious and philosophical significance, than with asking
themselves what was the place of science in the social system. They
were beginning at last to have a social conscience. A twentieth-
century system was developing, haphazardly and piecemeal; what
form it would take and how England might fit into it was as much
a scientist s business as anybody s. Some of them, of course, took
the easiest path to the Left; and were positive that science had
no significance unless considered in Marxist terms: like everything
else, it should be a handmaid of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
A great deal of propaganda was published about the success of pro
letarian Russian scientists, and even the Conservative Press occa
sionally printed news stories of their remarkable experiments on
dogs and rats.
The scientist now saw himself as the practical man who could
reorganize democracy if only he were given a chance. Professor
Lancelot Hogben followed up his best-selling Mathematics -for the
Million with Science for the Citizen: Science is no cosmic proph
ecy. True science, in the words of Robert Boyle, is "such knowl
edge as hath tendency to use". A scientific law embodies a recipe
for doing something, and its final validification rests in the domain
of action. . . . This is not the age of pamphleteers. It is the age of
engineers. The spark-gap is mightier than the pen. Democracy
will not be salvaged by men who talk fluently, debate forcefully
and quote aptly. Among the scientists who set about the work of
salvage was J. B. S. Haldane. Just back from a visit to Republican
Spain, he conducted a lively Left- Wing campaign for the provi
sion of deep, underground air-raid shelters for the whole popula-
380
SOCIAL CONSCIENCES 381
tion, bringing forward scientific proof of their effectiveness this,
however, bore no relation to his own science of biology. It was, in
r t ..... O/ 7
tact, a characteristic of scientists to make recommendations on
subjects far outside their own specialized fields; and the sociological
vogue accentuated it.
The most notable practical achievement of science in the period
was the development of synthetic products. German ersatz rubber,
Buna, often sneered at in the British Press, had a British-American
equivalent, Neoprene. Neither product was a slavish imitation of
rubber: both claimed additional virtues greater resistance to heat,
light, and chemical action. They were largely used in the oil and
chemical industries and for making printing rollers; and German
Buna car-tyres were said to last half as long again as ordinary ones.
By 1938 one-tenth of the world s rubber supply was produced
synthetically.
Experiments in making artificial silk stronger and more durable
continued; in 1939 the Americans were beginning commercial
production of a kind called Nylon, which they claimed to be more
elastic than real silk fibre and half as strong again. Patents were
applied for in Great Britain. The new plastics, such as bakelite,
were being put to countless new uses. Bakelite consisted of carbolic
acid molecules linked together by formaldehyde and could be
manufactured from coal-tar and milk: its chief use was as a substi
tute for wood and bone, because it did not warp, crack, or rot.
Plastics of all kinds could be coloured in the making and moulded
into any desired shape; thus the separate processes of sawing, plan
ing, joining, turning, finishing and painting, through which wood
had to go, were eliminated. Bakelite coffins, for instance, could be
turned out all in one piece. For some purposes plastics took the
place of metals: for plumbing, and even for bearings in machinery,
which needed lubricating only with water. Their lightness also
made them useful in aeroplane manufacture. Plastics became one of
the main British industries: half a million workers were employed
in it by 1939.
The effect of synthetic developments and of hydro-electric
power was to free industry from its old dependence on iron and
coal. Industry no longer needed to be strongly localized in areas
where natural products occurred, nor to rely wholly on imported
raw materials. Chile saltpetre could be made anywhere out of
32 SOCIAL CONSCIENCES
atmospheric nitrogen, aluminum alloys from clay, magnesium from
sea-salt, and sugar by bacterial agency from waste vegetable mat
ter. One result was that new light industries were set up in the
pleasanter Home Counties, with easy access to the gigantic London
market, instead of in the gloomy districts of the industrial north.
This drained away population and money from the north, as was
sadly apparent in the number of shops to let in the main streets of
its big cities.
The sociologists were justified in seeing these chemical tri
umphs as, ideally, a promise of the Golden Age of international
goodwill they would lessen competition for the possession of
raw materials, a chief cause of international dispute. But, in effect,
the success of synthetic products encouraged the nationalistic the
ory of economic autarchy ; and it was seen that if the totalitarian
powers could make themselves independent of raw rubber, oil, cot
ton, nitrates, then economic boycott or blockade was no longer an
effective weapon against an aggressor nation . Rayon, again, was a
most provocative invention. It threatened to make inroads on the
cotton trade, and this encouraged the Japanese, whose national
economy depended largely on exporting cheap cotton, v to conquer
China while they could still afford the necessary armaments.
As for Britain, for a century the national wealth had depended
on the possession or financial control of raw materials, and on
having heavy industries to convert them into goods and world
wide scope for export. But high tariffs and economic nationalism
were shrinking the free world-market almost to nothing, and Brit
ish heavy industries had to go through a period of disturbed and
painful adaptation. The many new light industries that had suc
cessfully grown up did not compensate for all the distress caused
by the breakdown of the nineteenth-century system. Everyone
was aware that the world was changing, and that Britain had to
change too. All sorts of plans were produced by every kind of
theorist: but without any central clearing-house to sort them out.
Medical science was still concerned more with devising cures for
particular diseases than with the general problem of raising the
standard of national health. The study of malnutrition was not
neglected, but there was no legislation to ensure that the millions of
poor got the nutrition recommended by the specialists. The Gov-
SOCIAL CONSCIENCES 383
eminent and the British Medical Association could not even agree
on their estimates of minimum food requirements. The B .MA. held
that the weekly allowance of money to be spent on food should be
considerably higher than that provided by Unemployment Relief.
But the B.M A. was a private body and unable to act even in fields
where it was acknowledged as the highest authority. The average
general practitioner had no time and little opportunity for prophyl
actic work: all that he could do was to mitigate the effects of often
preventable illnesses and disorders. Excessive numbers of panel
patients and excessive demands for medical certificates and returns
of one kind or another reduced him to the position of an over
worked prescription-agent and a licenser and registrar of sickness.
His work was seldom in any way co-ordinated with Ministry of
Health or with Home Office actvities such as sanitation, street
cleaning, and the working of the health clauses in the Factory Acts
and Coal Mines Acts. The charge of national health was uncertainly
divided between private enterprise and Government control. The
confusion of this compromise was increased by the difference in
the status of hospitals hospitals run by local authorities and sup
ported in whole or part by the rates, independent hospitals sup
ported by voluntary subscriptions, private nursing homes run for
profit. All these were managed by separate committees, followed
different methods, and fitted into no connected system.
Much research was being done into diseases which caused death
or, like the common cold, a yearly loss of hundreds of millions of
work-hours. The chief emphasis was on cure rather than preven
tion; medical research, like nearly all specialized scientific work,
being largely unrelated to social problems. The Press encouraged
this emphasis by headlining dramatic new developments such as
the radium and the Bendien cures for cancer, the insulin cure for
diabetes, and the liver cure for pernicious anemia a cure being
news in the journalistic sense, and prevention no news. (If it was
news when a man bit a dog, rather than when a dog bit a man, still
less newsworthy was the prevention of either incident by prudent
action.) The period was also remarkable for the treatment of vene
real diseases, and the insanity resulting from them, by induced
fevers; the elimination of varicose veins by the injection of an irri
tant which caused them to dry up; and new cures for sleeping sick
ness, pneumonia, and peritonitis. A new drug was sulphanilamide,
384 SOCIAL CONSCIENCES
which was effective in cases of pneumonia, gonorrhea, and mental
disorders; its disadvantage was that it left the patient s blood danger
ously thinned. For that, however, there was now a remedy blood
transfusion. Blood was drawn off in half -pints from the arms of
healthy volunteers and injected into the systems of the dangerously
ill. It could be stored on ice for months until it was needed. A reg
ister was kept of voluntary blood-donors, to be called upon in
emergencies. They were classified according to the newly discov
ered blood-groups.
Blood-groups made news in 1939, when it was found that chil
dren inherited the characteristics of the blood-group to which their
parents belonged. If a child had blood-characteristics which neither
parent possessed, some third party must be its real father. A man
could not be proved by these means to be the father of his supposed
child, but in some cases he could be proved not to be the father.
Blood-tests would obviously be useful in determining paternity
cases in the courts and add a new relish to an old type of sensa
tional newspaper story. In March 1939 the House of Lords was de
bating a Bill which would enable law courts to order blood-tests
though if either party refused, the case must be dismissed.
Advertisers were now exploiting the low level of national
health, especially as it manifested itself in tiredness and lack of
vitality. There was, for example, Horlick s Night-Starvation cam
paign, which represented a night-cap of malted milk as an infallible
aid to restful sleep. Daily doses of aperient salts ( enough to cover
a sixpence ) were recommended as a general cure-all: one firm
advertised with the contrasting figures of Mr. Can and Mr. Can t ,
another with the elegant phrase Inner Cleanliness , another started
a most successful whispering campaign which introduced the
names of Royalty and a Royal physician-in-ordinary. The general
medical opinion was that a daily dose of salts encouraged consti
pation, but the health-salt firms answered this by advertising their
products as non-habit forming . In a different field, but by the
same school of copywriters, soaps were sold as cures for Body
Odour .
A confidence-drug which created an immense stir at the end of
1936 was benzedrine, an importation from the U.SA. It was
claimed that students under its influence could pass examinations
that otherwise would baffle them; bar-tenders used it as an ingre-
SOCIAL CONSCIENCES 385
dient in pep-cocktails, and it was sold freely over chemists coun
ters. But in 1938, when coroners noted the increasing number of
suicide cases in which the victim had relapsed into depression after
taking benzedrine for some time, it was placed on the poisons-list,
and manufacturers were warned that it should only be used under
medical direction. Its widespread use in small inhalers was permit
ted, however, as a remedy for colds. The pathology of the com
mon cold continued to puzzle research workers. They pronounced
it to be the general name for perhaps a score of different minor
diseases, each responding, if at all, to a different treatment.
By the middle Thirties the medical profession had become seri
ously concerned about the advertising of patent medicines patent
only in name, for few were actually patented. There was nothing
in British law to prevent any firm from putting a medicine on the
market, claiming therapeutical properties for it, and recommending
it by means of bogus testimonials; so long as it did not contain a
known poison or contravene the Adulteration of Food Act. Makers
of these medicines were required by law to state their contents, but
the analytic formula was usually quite unintelligible to the ordinary
patient. The most that the law did was to prevent known poisons
from being indiscriminately sold. There was no public protection
against unlisted drugs which might prove poisonous, or against
the advertisement of universially beneficial compounds containing
ingredients that in particular cases might cause death.
By the Thirties the advertising patent medicines had grown
enormously. They occupied about one-sixth of the advertising
space in the daily Press, and about one-third of the space in the
popular weeklies. The old type of advertisement story which
showed a marvellous drug being given to some traveller by a grate
ful native in a particularly inaccessible part of the world was dis
placed by one which made it the culmination of a life-time of
laborious scientific research. One Sunday paper in 1938 was adver
tising in a single issue cures for epilepsy, varicose veins, piles,
eczema, rheumatism and neuritis, a remedy which banished hay-
fever, asthma, malaria, influenza and insomnia, and another which
brought rapid relief to eleven different kinds of pain, including
headaches, depression, insomnia, rheumatism, indigestion, consti
pation, and impure blood. In general, newspapers accepted patent-
medicine advertisements without question, the fees charged for
386 SOCIAL CONSCIENCES
advertising space forming a large part of their revenue: the Yadil
case was most exceptional. Most Tonic Wines sold to the ailing
poor at extortionate prices, to cover the expense of advertising, were
in every way inferior in medicinal effect to ordinary cheap grocer s
wine. A Bill to regulate the sale of these products had been intro
duced without success in 193 1. A new Bill was brought forward in
1936, on the lines of one that had become law in the United States,
to prohibit the advertisement of cures for blindness, cancer, con
sumption, epilepsy, paralysis, and Bright s disease. At the second
Commons reading, however, in March, the House was counted out
the reason being that it was the day of the Grand National
Steeplechase, which most members had gone to watch. The patent-
medicine business continued. But at least individual members of
the medical profession did not lend themselves to the fraud, the
penalty for either advertising themselves or sponsoring proprietary
goods being removal from the Medical Register.
There would have been no large market for these medicines, in
spite of the advertisement copy-writers part of whose profession
was inventing new disorders from which people might imagine
themselves to be suffering if a large proportion of the population
had not been in chronic ill-health. That this was so appeared dur
ing the Army recruiting drive in 1935 when no less than 62 per
cent of the prospective recruits could not attain the comparatively
low standard of physique required by the Army. The Pioneer
Health Centre at Peckham, which was founded in 1928 to prevent
sickness by regularly overhauling people, reported that 86 per cent
of those examined were found to be suffering from some disorder,
only 20 per cent were aware of it, and only 7 per cent receiving
treatment. It was to remedy this state of affairs that the National
Fitness Campaign was begun, but Low in a cartoon pointed out
the absurdity of recommending physical jerks to citizens suffering
from malnutrition and the effects of living in dilapidated houses in
Special Areas. In December 1937 a social research group, named
P.E.P. (Political and Economic Planning), published a fully docu
mented report on Britain s health. They summed up the position
thus: Perhaps the most fundamental defect in the existing system
is that it is overwhelmingly preoccupied with manifest and ad
vanced diseases or disabilities and is more interested in enabling the
sufferers to go on functioning in society somehow than in studying
SOCIAL CONSCIENCES 387
the nature of health and the means of producing and maintaining
it. From this it naturally follows that millions of pounds are spent
in looking after and trying to cure the victims of accidents and ill
nesses which need never have occurred if a fraction of this amount
of intelligence and money had been devoted to tracing the social
and economic causes of the trouble and making the necessary ad
justments/ In fact, the real problem was twofold: how to co-ordi
nate health services and how to pay for medical research. Lord
Nuffield was doing his best for medical research by endowing
magnificent laboratories at Oxford, at the cost of millions of
pounds, and giving away "iron lungs (artificial breathing appara
tuses) to any hospital that needed them. But the other problem
had to wait.
The P.E.P. group was one of several now engaged in social re
search. By the end of the Thirties the single plan to right all Brit
ain s wrongs, for which the cry had gone up during the Depression,
was no longer being expected. There were so many wrongs, and
they were so complicated, that obviously no single plan could
cover them all. Instead, private groups were making special studies
and analyses of particular subjects and drawing recommendations
from them. Besides P.E.P., there were the New Fabian Research
Bureau, and Social Survey committees sponsored by universities.
The several social surveys made were immense undertakings, pub
lished in many volumes; each thoroughly covered living and work
ing conditions in a single area. The Merseyside Survey, for example,
was carried out by Liverpool University. Neither these nor the
single-volume reports of private research groups were intended for
popular sale, but were works of reference, intended to guide local
and national authorities on social questions.
In the United States, shorter social histories and social surveys
had become popular among a wider public. There had been R. S.
and H. M. Lynd s Middleto f w7tj which gave the history of living
conditions in a small Middle-Western town. And F. L. Allen s Only
Yesterday, which presented the social life of the American Twen
ties in terms of fashion aad current topics as well as of public
events. Both books sold well in England, and had imitators. This
documenting of life as it had really been served more than an official
purpose: it was entertainment a dramatic crystallization of the
news that flowed in a haphazard stream through the newspapers.
388 SOCIAL CONSCIENCES
Also from the United States came public opinion investigation.
It was asked: What do people think, feel, want, from day to day
and from year to year? How does one know what they are think
ing, feeling, wanting? The answer was: Chiefly from newspapers,
books, films, plays, the radio the current topics, forms of enter
tainment and fashions. But no organization existed for the accurate
analysis of dumb public opinion even in totalitarian states where
the Ministries of Propaganda were more concerned with directing
public opinion than with investigating it. The only investigation
that had hitherto been done in the United States and in Britain was
for commercial purposes. Advertising firms had been making in
creased use of market research that is, they had employed girls
to go round and find out by door-to-door questioning what people
wanted and what could be sold to them. Girls were used because it
was found that they were more readily and courteously answered
than men. Advertising firms were thus able to advise their clients
as to what goods the public could be made to buy, and what adver
tising line would be most persuasive.
Public opinion investigation was first started on a large and
permanent scale by the American Dr. Gallup. His American Insti
tute of Public Opinion used fairly accurate methods of gauging
opinion on particular topics by taking what were called straw-
votes because they showed which way the wind was blowing.
Small samples only of the population were touched, classed accord
ing to age, sex, income, and locality groups. Changes of opinion
could be measured by repeating the same question among the same
small sample-group of people. In this way Dr. Gallup managed to
be right for example, in forecasting President Roosevelt s victory
over Landon in the Presidential election of 1936, when other straw-
votes taken at the same time, such as that of the Literary Digest,
were either completely wrong or far out in their percentages. A
branch of Dr. Gallup s organization was set up in England in 1938
under the name of the British Institute of Public Opinion. The
News Chronicle bought the exclusive right to publish its results.
The Institute confined itself chiefly to questions on political mat
ters, to which a simple Yes was an adequate answer.
Straw-votes indicating Yes-or-No attitudes were useful chiefly
to politicians and newspaper editors, who had to reckon with pub-
SOCIAL CONSCIENCES 389
lie opinion and had so far been content merely to guess what it was.
But a more ambitious scheme of social reporting was launched in
England in 1936 under the name of Mass Observation by two
young men: Charles Madge, a poet and journalist, and Tom Har-
risson, an amateur anthropologist. They proposed to observe al
most everything. In a Tact pamphlet, issued in 1937, they described
their work: Mass Observation intends to make use, besides the
work of scientists, of the untrained observer, the man in the street.
Ideally, it is the observation of everyone by everyone, including
themselves. . . More recent acquisitions to society electricity,
aeroplanes, radio are so new that the process of adaptation to
them is still going on. It is within the scope of the science of Mass
Observation to watch the process taking place perhaps to play
some part in determining the adaptation of old superstitions to new
conditions/
It set out, in fact, to be the science of everyday life, an anthro
pology of civilized peoples. No need to go to the South Seas to
study strange customs and queer habits; English customs and habits
were equally strange and queer, and in greater need of documenta
tion.
By good publicity work on the part of its organizers, most
newspapers were drawn into taking notice of Mass Observation.
It was, as might have been expected, unfavourable notice. William
Hickey gave it a few paragraphs in the Daily Express, headed
Pryers, Please ! The Sunday Times described it as Mass
Eavesdropping . The Spectator criticized observers as Busybodies
of the Left and, indeed, many of them were Left-inclined, at
tracted by the hope that fact-finding would bring to fruition the
theory of socialist realism. Despite the support of the zoologist
Julian Huxley, and the qualified approval of the anthropologist
Malinowski^ the greater part of the Press ridiculed Mass Observa
tion s claim to be a science. As the Spectator declared: Scientifically
they re about as valuable as a chimpanzee tea-party at the Zoo.
From the point of view of publicity, a wide bad Press was
better than a small good one, and Mass Observation became over
night a recognized social phenomenon. After spending some time/
on a rather haphazard collection of people s dream images, a survey -
of the behaviour of the crowds on Coronation Day, and an exami-
39 SOCIAL CONSCIENCES
nation of social habits in Bolton and Blackpool with the help of
enthusiastic field-work parties it came to concentrate more ex
pertly on investigating public opinion and its sources.
The significance of Mass Observation and of Dr. Gallup s Insti
tute was that they provided democracy with the skeleton of an
opinion-sounding machine, which could serve as a guide to the
opinion-forming influences. The most arresting phrase in which
democracy has ever been described was Abraham Lincoln s Gov
ernment of the people, by the people, for the people . Yet every
one knew that it was not government by the people, but by
representatives of particular interests employers, workmen, the
professions, and so on who were supposed to take into account
the people s general interests, and who succeeded confusedly in
doing so simply by a compromise between their own conflicting
views. The people s general interests consisted of two things: what
they needed and what they thought. Social research and social
survey work could help to direct attention to what they needed,
and public opinion investigation to show what they thought and
why. It began to be realized towards the end of the Thirties that
a closer integration of community needs and feelings would make
class-war unnecessary and even impossible; and because of this
realization the Left was growing less interested in ideal anarchy
or Red revolution, and applying more of its energies to research
work that would assist in bringing about social integration.
Such research groups, however, were too small to exercise any
great influence, and agitation remained the chief means by which
strongly felt wrongs could be righted. There were in 1937 1,600,000
unemployed, in spite of the rearmament boom, and the Left was
accusing the Conservatives of allowing rearmament problems and
foreign crises to blind them to the continued poverty of the Special
Areas. In 1938 the National Unemployed Workers Movement,
which had developed the technique of Hunger Marches, started
a new campaign to wake up the Blimps. In August of that year they
had already frightened the Government into passing the Winter
Adjustments Regulations, which granted Unemployment Assistance
Boards powers to award extra winter relief. The mass of the un
employed, however, was not eligible for such awards. As winter
approached, Wai Hannington, the organizer of the N.U.W.M.,
decided to exploit the nuisance value of the unemployed in a
SOCIAL CONSCIENCES 391
series of stunt agitations. The technique was one that had been bril
liantly developed before the war by Christabel Pankhurst, leader
of the militant Suffragettes; and since improved by Gandhi whose
followers did not scream and struggle with policemen but just
lay about in impassive and inert heaps.
One of the most successful of these stunts took place at 3.15
in the afternoon five days before Christmas, in Oxford Street,
which was then crammed with Christmas shoppers. At a signal
from their leader, two hundred unemployed men played the Indian
hartal trick: lying down in front of the traffic at a moment when
the red lights had halted it. They lay on their backs, head to toe,
eight abreast, right across the road. The sight of their bodies,
almost beneath the wheels of buses, vans, and cars, made many of
the women shoppers on the pavements scream. Crowds then rushed
to the scene, looking anxiously at the traffic lights and wondering
what would happen when they turned green. When the lights
did change, not a wheel moved. The men in the roadway had
meanwhile spread posters over their bodies, which read Work or
Bread , and had begun to chant in unison We want work or bread
and "We want extra relief. After half a dozen changes of lights the
whole of Oxford Street was one vast traffic jam. The police rushed
up, perplexed, shouting politely, Get up, you fellows, you re
holding up the traffic/ At this some of the crowd burst into
laughter, in which the demonstrators joined. More police arrived
and began to drag the men individually on to the pavements, to
the accompaniment of ironical cheers from the onlookers. Those
dragged off immediately went back to their places in the roadway
while their comrades were being similarly dealt with. The police
called for volunteer help from the crowd, but no one stirred. Re
inforcements from Scotland Yard were meanwhile themselves
caught in the traffic jam. Only after a prolonged struggle and the
immobilization of traffic over a huge area for an hour or so was
order restored.
More stunts followed. One hundred unemployed invaded the
Grill Room at the Ritz and asked for tea. When the police arrived,
they dispersed in an orderly way, but their action drew feature
articles from the popular Press contrasting the life of the unem
ployed with that of the habitues of the Ritz. Then came a petition
to the King, and on Christmas Eve the picketting of the main rail-
39 2 SOCIAL CONSCIENCES
way stations with posters: A Square Deal the Unemployed Want
a Square Meal Now . (The railways were then conducting an
advertisement campaign for a Square Deal , chiefly directed against
the motor transport companies.) On Christmas Day, 150 demon
strators assembled outside the house of the Chairman of the Un
employed Assistance Board and sang a carol to the tune of the
Policeman s Holiday . On New Year s Eve at n p.m., when
crowds were collecting in Trafalgar Square, a procession of unem
ployed suddenly appeared, bearing a black coffin. They marched
sombrely down the Strand and Fleet Street and on into Stepney,
having frequent tussles with the police, who attempted in vain to
impound the coffin. Three days later they tried to leave the coffin
at No. 10 Downing Street. Here again there was trouble with the
police, but they were allowed to deliver the message contained
inside the coffin: Unemployed No Appeasement! (It was four
months after the Munich Agreement, and Chamberlain was just
preparing to visit Mussolini in Rome.)
The demonstrations continued throughout January, the coffin
frequently reappearing. On another occasion a party of demon
strators, in Suffragette fashion, chained themselves to the railings
outside the house of Ernest Brown, the Minister of Labour, and
the police had to use hack-saws to free them. They were arrested
and charged with using insulting words and behaviour . During
this winter the trenches and air-raid shelters, which had been
hastily dug in the previous September, became completely water
logged, and a subject of much newspaper fun. A party of eighty
unemployed took advantage of this to occupy the trenches on
Primrose Hill, overlooking the Zoo. They carried fishing rods, to
which were attached huge eels, and posters which read: Bring
Anderson to Eel Give us Work on A.R.P. (Sir John Anderson,
a former Governor of Bengal, was now Lord President of the
Council, appointed to supervise Air Raid Precautions.) The police
ordered them to move on. They asked whether the trenches were
not for public use. The police replied lamely: Yes, but you can t
fish in them.
The campaign did not succeed in exacting new concessions
from the Government, but it won the attention of the Press and
the amused sympathy of the public, which had indeed been blinded
to the continuance of unemployment by local prosperity caused
SOCIAL CONSCIENCES 393
by the rearmament boom and the migration of industries to the
south. The British Press now began to print consoling reports of
what was being done for the unemployed. Occupational clubs had
been in operation since 1933: instead of standing listlessly at the
street-corners men were finding a fresh object in life. The chief
difficulty, it was reported, that the organizers of these clubs met,
was non-co-operation on the part of the unemployed. They sus
pected a Government plot to train them into half -skilled carpenters
or boot repairers and then turn them out to under-cut prices of
fully trained men. At Lincoln, unemployed were running their
own nursery school; at Bryn-mawr, they had turned a slag-heap
into a public park and built a swimming pool; at Hebburn, they
had converted an old power station into a magnificent community
hall for dances, plays, whist drives, and meetings. It was reported
that though allotments were popular in Sheffield and Ipswich,
among other places, in many towns the unemployed could not be
brought to see any virtue in them at all. (The allotment scheme, it
may be added, was better run than any other; it was under the
control of the Society of Friends.)
The financial depression was now officially over and an indus
trial recovery under way. The extent of the recovery may be
judged by the quotations of industrial shares on the Stock Ex
change; between 1932 and 1937 these nearly doubled in value.
Industrial profits, which had averaged six per cent in 1932, had
now risen to ten per cent not much below the 1929 boom level
and even this ten per cent did not represent the full advance, sur
plus profits being ^ploughed in to avoid taxation. In some fields
the recovery had been even more marked: the output of cars had
more than doubled since 1931, so had the monthly output of steel,
and the rate of production in electrical engineering and shipbuild
ing had almost quadrupled. Nor did 1938 and 1939 bring a reces
sion.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Markets Close Firmer 9
The National Government was allowed to take some of the
honour for Recovery, though cynical economists pointed out that
in the prevailing Capitalist system recovery, like depression, was
almost beyond the power of governments to prevent. Some praise
came even from the Left G. D. H. Cole, for example, in a
pamphlet, Economic Prospects of 1938: 1 hate the National Gov
ernment as much as anyone hates it, but at the same time I am well
aware that in certain matters it has shown plenty of competence.
It was competent to bring down interest rates and to base upon
them a boom in private house-building which for the time being
saved the Government the expense of financing a housing pro
gramme of its own. And, on the whole, its banking policy has
been competent or, rather, it has worked in so well with the
bankers that they have been prepared on its behalf to follow a sen
sible line, which they would certainly not follow voluntarily or on
behalf of a Government of the Left.
In spite of strong criticism of its Non-intervention policy in
Spain, and continued violent demonstrations against the Means
Test, the National Government jogged along fairly comfortably.
It .was looked upon as reasonably progressive, the best that could
be expected from a Government largely composed of Conserva
tives. Attempts were made from the Left Centre to start a B.M.G.
campaign ( Baldwin Must Go on the analogy of the old c Bal-
four Must Go line). But Baldwin s personality was not one to
excite strong feelings in any breast: he had none of the provoca
tive brilliance of Lloyd George or Winston Churchill and his only
devoted personal following was in the Conservative Party central
office. There a legend had been built up for him of being a plain,
sound, trustworthy man Honest Stan , in fact. It was said that
394
"MARKETS CLOSE FIRMER 395
his greatest asset when he chose to exercise it was tactical skill
in managing his party: tactical skill, too, in surmounting crises, the
Strike, the Depression, the Abdication, with the least possible dis
turbance to himself, his party, or the country. Finally, he was a
past master at timing his occasional bursts of appalling frankness*
to best political advantage.
Winston Churchill was c in the wilderness . He had spoken out
against the Nazi regime soon after it came into power and, for the
sake of peace, Baldwin had denied him office. On the 2 8th Novem
ber 1934 he had made a very strong speech about the danger to
Britain of the new German air force:
Germany ... is now equipping itself once again, 70,000,000
of people, with the technical apparatus of modern war, and at the
same time is instilling into the hearts of its youths and manhood the
most extreme patriotic, nationalist, and militarist conceptions. Ac
cording to what we hear, according to what we are told, and what
comes in from every quarter, though little is said about it in pub
lic, Germany has akeady a powerful, well-equipped army, with
an excellent artillery, and an immense reserve of armed, trained
men. The German munition factories are working practically
under war conditions, and war material is flowing out from them, *
and has been for the last twelve months in an ever broadening
stream. Much of this is undoubtedly in violation of the treaties
which were signed. Germany is rearming on land; she is rearming
also to some extent at sea; but what concerns us most of all is the
rearmament of Germany in the air. ... I shall be specially careful
not to exaggerate. Indeed, I hope that every statement that I make
will be admitted to be an understatement. ... I therefore assert,
first, that Germany already has a military air force . . . which
only awaits an order to assemble in full open combination and
that this illegal air force is rapidly approaching equality with our
own. . . . Secondly, the German air force will this time next year
be in fact at least as strong as our own, and it may be even stronger.
Thirdly . . . two years from now . . . the German mili
tary air force will be nearly 50 per cent stronger, and in 1937
nearly double. All this is on the assumption . . - that there is no
acceleration on the part of Germany, and no slowing down on our
part. . . . Beware: Germany is a country fertile in military sur
prises!
396 MARKETS CLOSE FIRMER
He went on to discuss the possibility of the German air force
before long reaching 10,000 machines. Baldwin replied to this
staggering piece of news:
Even now, when things look at their blackest, I have not given
up hope either for the limitation or for the restriction of some
kind of arms. ... I think it is correct to say that the Germans
are engaged in creating an air force. . . . The figures we have
range from a figure ... of 600 aircraft to something not over
1,000. . . . The first-line strength ... of the R.A.F. to-day, at
home and overseas, is 880 aircraft. . . . We propose to form in
the years 1935 and 1936, 22 squadrons for home defence and, in
addition, 3 squadrons for the Fleet Air Arm. . . . That means that
by 1936 our first-line strength will be increased by some 300 air
craft over its present figure. . . .
As for the position this time next year . . . we estimate that
we shall have a margin in Europe alone of nearly 50 per cent. I
cannot look farther forward than the next two years. Such inves
tigations as I have been able to make lead me to believe that the
right honourable member for Epping s figures are considerably
exaggerated.
The Daily Telegraph supported Baldwin in a leader, typical of
the general Conservative view. It revealed details of British air-
expansion unknown to the general public: Eleven new sites for
aerodromes have been selected, six have been acquired; plans for
altering some forty of the older stations are in hand; one new train
ing school for flying has been opened and another will be ready
in April. Air estimates . . . money will be readily voted by a
House that, except perhaps on the Socialist benches, showed itself
genuinely concerned at recent revelations of the inferiority we
have imposed on ourselves in the hitherto fruitless search for peace
for the world, and not less at the speed with which Germany is
rearming herself in the air as on land.
There was not a single mention of Churchill in this leader. At
the end of 1936 Churchill was still in the wilderness. In Robert
Graves s diary for November 24th that year there is a note:
"Saw Winston by appointment at Morpeth Mansions this
evening. Told him that as a non-party ex-Serviceman, who had
been living in Spain, I wished to stress the great danger of the
situation in the western Mediterranean: where the Germans and
"MARKETS CLOSE FIRMER 397
Italians are threatening British strategical positions. He said angrily,
referring to the Spanish war: "Both sides have imbrued their hands
with blood do you wish for intervention? The country wouldn t
stand it," I replied: "Not intervention in the sense of taking sides
in the pretended ideological struggle in Spain but of safeguard
ing British interests in the Mediterranean." He said: "Seven French
Deputies have just been to see me, making frantic appeals to me to
urge intervention the best brains in France." I said: "They know
you are about the only member in the House with any power as a
speaker." He said, suddenly changing his tone: "The trouble is,
we are so damned weak. It is Baldwin who has reduced us to this
shameful condition. If we went to war now we should have equal
chances of defeat and victory." He paced up and down the room:
"Baldwin is in power and Parliament is lethargic," "You could
rouse them," I said. "Speak out as you did in 1934 and you ll have
an overwhelming popular following. Everyone is waiting for
you." He spoke of the strength of the Press behind Baldwin. I
said: "Press propaganda does not guide or represent the country s
real feelings nowadays. Go to a news-cinema any night, and get a
sense of the people s reaction to news-reels of the Dictators. And
look at Roosevelt s victory a 2-1 victory when the Press was
3-1 against him!" He agreed that if one put the issue to the country
at a general election something might be done but there was no
chance of that, Baldwin being so firm in the saddle. He said that^
he would make a speech the next day that he hoped would please
me. He was thoroughly worked up/
Churchill nearly got his chance a few days later in the Abdica
tion Crisis; but Baldwin won, and settled more firmly than ever
in the saddle.
1937 was Baldwin s year of triumph. He saw crowned the
King whom he had brought to the throne, and wisely decided to
retire amid the glory that the Coronation brought him. In May
he made last speeches to the House, to his constituents, and to a
Youth Rally at the Albert Hall. The torch which I pass on to you,
he said benevolently to Youth, and ask you to pass from handle
hand and along the pathways of the Empire, is the great Christian
truth rekindled anew in each ardent generation. I have had my
hour and pass soon into the shade, but life lies before you. The
words echoed dimly through the auditorium, as if from far back
398 MARKETS CLOSE FIRMER
in the nineteenth century; yet it was a dignified farewell. He be
came an earl and took up the life of a country worthy in Worces
tershire, making only rare appearances in the House of Lords.
He did not, of course, pass on his torch to the youth of Britain,
but to a man only two years younger than himself: Neville Cham
berlain, the younger son of f j e> Chamberlain and brother of
Nazi-hating and vigorous Sir Austen. He had begun life as a sisal-
planter in the West Indies, then returned to England and become
interested in the municipal politics of Birmingham in 1915 he
was that city s Lord Mayor. In 1916-17 he had been Director-
General of National Service. In the Twenties he had occupied the
not very illustrious posts of Postmaster-General and Minister of
Health, and was regarded merely as the competent junior member
of a famous political family. For the last six years, however, he
had been Chancellor of the Exchequer and had gained a reputa
tion for business-like bureaucratic orthodoxy. As soon as he be
came Prime Minister, so Conservative columnists reported, his
Cabinet, his party, and the House immediately recognized his
qualities of brisk leadership. Yet to the country in general during
his first year of office he seemed an unremarkable figure: gaunt,
with bushy eyebrows and an old-fashioned moustache, but no
democratically endearing features.
In the Cabinet reshuffle which followed on Baldwin s retire
ment Sir John Simon became Chancellor of the Exchequer: though
the Manchurian affair of 1932, when he was Foreign Secretary,
had smudged his copybook as the clubmen phrased it. He pro
posed a National Defence Contribution, levied upon business, for
financing rearmament. The City strongly objected: the levy
would drive business away and so contribute rather to a new
slump than to rearmament. The N.D.C. was modified so as not
to bear too heavily on profits: this pleased the City and also the
Left, as a new proof of the Government s capitalistic wickedness.
Another ex-Foreign Secretary with a smudged copybook was
appointed Home Secretary. This was Sir Samuel Hoare, whose
plan to carve up Abyssinia had now been forgiven him by his
colleagues. Alfred Duff Cooper took his place at the Admiralty,
although he had not proved a great success at the War Office,
despite his warm agreement with the Chief of the Imperial Gen
eral Staff, General Sir Archibald Montgomery-Massingberd, that
MARKETS CLOSE FIRMER 399
mechanization of the Army at the expense of the cavalry arm was
both unnecessary and dangerous.
The new War Minister was Leslie Hore-Belisha, who immedi
ately began to apply to the popularization of the Army the same
brisk methods which had created such a stir in the Ministry of
Transport. He listened to the advice of reliable military experts
outside the military hierarchy, with the intention of making the
Army as progressive and efficient, if possible, as the Navy. The
chief of these experts was Captain Liddell Hart, who had already
been asked by the new Minister for the Co-ordination of Defence
(Sir Thomas Inskip) to study the question of Army Reorganiza
tion. Liddell Hart reported among other things that:
c The size of the British Army has been determined not on any
scientific calculation of its needs, but simply on a post-war re
turn to the pre-war standard; and the proportions of the different
arms in the total are not based on any principle either.
There has been no real change in arm-proportions since 1870
a time when the number of "bayonets", as opposed to "fire-
units", was the natural way of calculating an army s strength.
Army tactical training is still based on the slow-moving infantry
battalion, the other arms being regarded as mere auxiliaries.
*The chief need now is for mobile mechanized divisions, an
increase of anti-aircraft defences, and a motorized infantry.
Hore-Belisha met with violent opposition to the reforms which
he attempted to introduce in the spirit of this report even when
he had persuaded the Army Council to retire some of the elder
generals. Active field-officers who saw the enormous possibilities
of army mechanization had advocated it at the sacrifice of their
careers: the five who successively became major-generals between
1930 and 1937 had each in turn, on promotion, either been given
no further employment or removed to commands where they
had no chance to put their views into practice. The c bow-and-
arrow-brigade , as General Crozier had named them, was still domi
nant in the Army. Liddell Hart s name was especially execrated
in higher Army circles and the mischievous rumour was set going
that, like Hore-Belisha, he was of Jewish blood the Army con
tained a strong anti-Semitic element. The situation had been well
expressed by General Sir Philip Chetwode in January 1935, when
C-in-C. in India. He had told graduates of the Quetta Staff Col-
4 "MARKETS CLOSE FIRMER
lege that he was horrified at the number of officers he found who
allowed themselves to sink into a state of complete brain slackness.
Their narrow interests are bounded by the morning parade, the
game they happen to play, and purely local and unimportant mat
ters. . . . War, and particularly successful war, is much more an
affair of imagination than people think, but few officers of the
Army allow much pjay to their imagination. It would almost seem
that it was a crime to do so, or to be one inch outside "sealed
pattern" and regulations. The longer I remain in the Service, the
more wooden and the more regulation-bound do I find the average
British officer to be/
Hore-Belisha s regenerative task was therefore a next to im
possible one. The root of the trouble was that the well-bred
horse was still considered the chief auxiliary of the infantryman,
and the infantry remained the main arm both for offence and de
fence. In Cavalry Training, 1937, twenty-three pages of text were
devoted to sword and lance exercises, illustrated by twenty draw
ings, and a further twelve plates devoted to drill; a brief supple
ment to this was enough for armoured cars, in which it was laid
down:
The principle and system of Cavalry Training (Mechanized)
will be as laid down in Cavalry Training (Horsed), with certain
modifications laid down in this chapter.
Mounted drill (in armoured cars) is based on the same prin
ciples as that of cavalry.
The principles of training in field operations given in Cavalry
Training (Horsed) are, in general, applicable to armoured car
regiments.
Ministers came and Ministers went, but the National Govern
ment remained the same: more national, however, in name than
in representation. Home affairs were not offering any widely
debatable problems; in London, at least, the Depression was for
gotten. Indeed, a Twentyish spirit was beginning to crop up
again a beggar outside the Piccadilly Hotel wore the remnants
of fine clothes and carried, instead of the usual beggar s cap, a
frayed top-hat, with a notice saying: Hallelujah, I m a failure .
But the economic recovery was tempting a great many people who
had lived through anxious times to shout suddenly in their hearts:
Hallelujah, I m a success , and to disregard the omens of war.
MARKETS CLOSE FIRMER 401
Two wars were in progress: in Spain and in China. Spain still
figured prominently in the news. Captain Potato Jones, with old-
world sea-doggishness, had insisted on running the Insurgent
blockade and delivering his cargo of potatoes to the starving citi
zens of Bilbao. The historic Basque city of Guernica had been
bombed almost out of existence by German planes in the service
of General Franco; which roused humanitarian, anti-Fascist feel
ings in circles far beyond the Left, and tempted the Die-Hard
Press to assert, in defiance of common sense, that Red Basques
had themselves blown the town to pieces with dynamite. Then
followed the fall of the Basque and Asturian provinces, with
violent repercussions in Britain because of the hospitality given
to Basque refugee children, whom the Right denounced as Red
hooligans likely to corrupt our pure English youth , and the
Left defended with aggressive sentimental pity. In Autumn 1937
there was piracy in the Mediterranean ; unknown 5 submarines
were sinking merchant ships bound for Spanish Republican ports.
This was felt by the Fleet as derogating from British naval pres
tige and the Government was stung into action. A conference was
called at Nyon in Switzerland, and an agreement made with the
French and Italians to patrol the coasts of Spain in order to pro
tect shipping. The sinkings diminished, and even the Left con
gratulated the Government on having acted, for once, with
promptitude: the honour went to Anthony Eden, the Foreign
Secretary, on whose initiative the conference was said to have
been called.
The other war had broken out in China in July 1937: by August
the Japanese were in possession of Pekin. The same month they
fired on and seriously injured the British ambassador to China as
he was driving in his car; but diplomatic apologies covered up this
incident. In August they were landing at Shanghai, in Decem
ber they advanced on Nanking, the Chinese capital, and during
1938 they pushed on five hundred miles farther up the Yangtse
River, past Hankow, and also occupied Canton in the south. The
China war, however, was too far away to attract much attention
in Britain, and the Spanish war had become such a permanent fea
ture of the European scene that people took it for granted. Neither
war seemed likely to spread. Mussolini, it was said, had plenty to
occupy him in Abyssinia, and in the end the Spaniards would
402 MARKETS CLOSE FIRMER
throw out the Italian troops and the German technicians and
airmen, whichever side won; Britain could then cash in with recon
struction loans.
As for Germany: was there not the Anglo-German naval pact,
which limited the German navy to 35 per cent of the British, to
prove that Hitler could be conciliatory and intended no menace
to the British Empire? Was not Lord Halifax, formerly Viceroy
of India and now Lord President of the Council, conferring
amicably with him in Berlin in November 1937? Had not Hitler
himself said in May 1933: No fresh European war is capable of
putting something better in place of the unsatisfactory conditions
which exist to-day. On the contrary, neither politically nor eco
nomically could the use of any kind of force in Europe create a
more favourable situation/ . . . And what about Russia? A series
of mass trials of alleged Trotskyist wreckers was alienating a
great deal of British Left sympathy. The intelligent Marshal Tuka-
chevsky, who had attended the Jubilee of King George V, was
sentenced to be shot in July 1937 along with seven other generals.
In spite of the newly introduced Russian constitution, claimed
to be the most democratic in the world, people shook their heads
doubtfully over Russia and spoke of ineradicable Asiatic tyranny.
Even some of the Left felt discouraged and ceased to take the
Daily Worker. Yet it was noted with relief that the Russian gen
erals crime had been discovered in good time they had been
having secret talks with their opposite numbers in the German
Army!
Whatever happened in this country or that, it still seemed to
the mass of people in Britain that peace would go on for ever:
war was unthinkable. This peace-time mood showed itself in
January 1938 in tremendous excitement in the Press over the fact
that Princess Juliana of the Netherlands was about to have a
baby. Would it be a boy or a girl? If it were a girl Holland might
have a succession of Queens whose lives would span a century.
As January drew to a close, tension increased: the Dutch were
reported to have made all their arrangements for that month, in
cluding the manufacture of dated Royal birthday mugs. Would
all these have to be scrapped? Providentially no: a girl was born
on January 30th.
There was no lack of other newspaper topics to divert public
MARKETS CLOSE FIRMER 403
interest from the international scene. For example the pick-a-
back planes, Mtia and Mercury, which made successful trials in
February. In the previous July there had been two-way air-mail
flights across the Atlantic: how soon, people were asking, would
passengers also be carried? Next came the case of the Mayfair
men 5 , Harley, Wilmer, and their associates, who were sentenced
to be flogged and to serve long terms of penal servitude for hav
ing committed a violent jewel robbery in a high-class London
hotel. The crime was the more newsworthy because the criminals
belonged to an upper-class social set. This was well-featured in
the popular Press with a bright spotlight on the administration of
the cat and its effects. From this sprang a controversy upon the
morality of flogging as a punishment and its efficacy as a deterrent,
which led Sir Samuel Hoare, the Home Secretary, to abolish it.
There was another welcome torso mystery ; the mutilated body
of a professional dancing partner was found at the house of an
ex- Army captain, who had himself disappeared.
Yet political events were moving quickly. Neville Chamberlain
was already pursuing a policy of appeasing the Dictators: in Feb
ruary 1938, Mussolini was the object of his efforts. He met with
opposition, however, even within his own party, and Anthony.
Eden resigned from the Government, declaring, We must not
buy goodwill. At the debate which followed on his resignation
the Government s majority in the House fell to 162, chiefly be
cause of a large number of Conservative abstentions. The party
line was now being enforced so strictly in the House that Conser
vative M.P.s could only signify their disagreement with it by ab
staining from voting otherwise they ran the risk of losing party
support in their constituencies. No longer free representatives of
the people, M.P.S were thus dragooned into party loyalty, as in
the days of the personal Government of George III. Eden him
self remained loyal to the old school tie, and did not, as some
hoped, lend any support to the Left attempts to bring down the
Government: he preserved a gentlemanly restraint.
In March came the first overt act of Nazi aggression outside
Germany proper: the occupation of Austria. For many it was a
complete surprise, for the Press had reported on February mh
that the Austrian Chancellor Schuschnigg had had a highly suc
cessful diplomatic conference with Hitler. But on the whole, the
404 MARKETS CLOSE FIRMER
^annexation of Austria was received quietly: the Austrians were
really Germans, people remarked, and theirs was a small coun
try a head and stomach that had been lopped of its limbs why
should it not be united with the Reich? And the usual optimism
was expressed by those who did not understand the thorough
ness of the Nazi regime. It was said that the Austrians were tem
peramentally very different from the Germans: to incorporate
them into the Reich would cause Hitler plenty of trouble. British
politicians denounced Hitler s act in mild terms as a rape to
be accused of rape in Britain subjected one to much less loss of
respect than defalcation or bigamy and only a few of the more
advanced members of the Opposition prophesied correctly to what
it would lead. Sir Stafford Cripps said: The independence of
Austria has disappeared. . . . Germany s next act of aggression
will be directed against Czechoslovakia, and then the people of
Great Britain will find themselves back in the days of 1914. But
nobody listened to Sir Stafford.
One of the immediate effects of the Austrian coup was to
inspire renewed confidence among British investors and business
men. No counter-action had followed this act of aggression: the
profitable rearmament campaign could proceed at leisure. The
front page of the Financial New? for the ipth March 1938 con
tained these items:
Vickers Good Profits.
English Steel Pay 20 per cent.
Cammell Laird Income Rises Sharply.
Thomas Frith and John Brown Earn More.
Markets Close Firmer.
Royal Mail Lines Pay More.
Dunlop Pays 9 per cent.
Stock Exchange More Confident.
The confidence of the Stock Exchange, reflected in the news
papers, spread to the public, which had no sense of the imminence
of war or the real dangers of the military situation. It was known
that new ships were being laid down for the Navy, and that the
Royal Air Force was being trebled; Hore-Belisha s Army Reforms
were also being well publicized. The Sunday Express reported
at the beginning of summer that in the New Army troops were
MARKETS CLOSE FIRMER 405
no longer expected to go daily for long route marches or take
part only in the endless formalities of drill; instead they were
whisked rapidly round the country in lorries and tanks. The
modern soldier, the Express said, had ceased to be of the old,
tough, liquor-loving, brave but stupid type: he was intelligent,
he smoked a lot, but he rarely drank, and he consumed great quan
tities of nourishing cream buns and chocolate. The Army was no
longer advertised merely by the old adventure-appeal posters:
Join the Army and See the World , but by Join the Modern
Army , with pictures of tanks, searchlights, lorries, anti-aircraft
guns all calculated to attract the mechanically minded, modern
young man. This publicity for what Hore-Belisha hoped to be
able to effect, and some successful reforms in the status of the
Territorial Army and in the living conditions of soldiers, encour
aged recruiting. At the beginning of 1939 the cadres of the Regular
and Territorial Annies were almost filled though the Spectator
noted that it was proving easier to find officers than men for the
latter. . , 9
Much disgust was felt with Belisha s Army democratization
by regular Army officers, especially with his plan for awarding
commissions to promising N.C.O.s. It was felt that this course
might be a proper one in war-time when the right type of man
would at once be drafted into the ranks, but not in time of peace.
The right type of man meant the socially right type from the
Officers Mess point of view the ex-public-schoolboy. It was
admittedly true that there were a number of active, intelligent and
forceful N.C.O.S who, as war-time officers, might well know bet
ter what to do in a tight corner than some graduates of Sandhurst;
but that was not the point. The country was still at peace, and if
there was one thing that the Army officer disliked it was a ranker
officer who "ate peas with his knife and did not know how to
address a lady ; a number of these had continued to hold commis
sions after the war ended, until forced to resign or transfer by the
studied coldness of their brothers-in-arms.
Mildly disquieting questions were occasionally raised in the
House and in the Press. Were our rearmament plans already out
of date? Was Air Force expansion behind schedule? What about
Ground Defence? The last was a particularly sore subject. Bar
rage balloons had been suggested, but would enough be sent up
406 MARKETS CLOSE FIRMER
to keep off raiders? And was Britain not short of anti-aircraft
guns? Were part-time voluntary A.R.P. workers sufficient? What
about fire-fighting services? And what were the functions and
powers of those heroic busybodies, the Wardens? Then there were
gas-masks the Government intended to distribute them to every
body yet would they be proof against the most poisonous gases
or, indeed, against any?
The most controversial subject was air-raid shelters. The Gov
ernment was planning, it was said, to provide blast-proof steel
shelters for every house in the country free to all below a certain
income level to be sunk in the garden and covered with a protec
tive layer of earth. Many people, however, had no gardens in
which shelters could be sunk. Besides, the efficacy of this type of
shelter was derided both by engineers and by Leftists who had
been to Barcelona and had seen the effect of modern bombing
attacks. The Government came in for heavy criticism in a pamphlet
called Ten Cambridge Scientists and Air Redd Protection. No
cognizance, the scientists said, had been taken of high-explosive
bombs. Compared with these, gas was a negligible danger, if it was
used at all which was unlikely, since it had not been used in
Spain. They accused the Government of distributing masks and
shelters only as confidence-propaganda. The proposed precautions
would fail , they wrote, even in this respect, the moment war
broke out, and the propaganda drive which is being used to popu
larize them is a tragic deception of the people of this country.
These ten from Cambridge had social consciences, and protested
strongly against the expenditure of A.R.P. money solely on the
protection of business and residential quarters, to the neglect of
working-class districts. Some borough councils, such as Finsbury
in London, on which there was a Labour majority, then brought
forward grandiose plans for the construction of deep shelters for
all, but they were too expensive to be proceeded with. It is not
altogether remarkable that so much energy went into controversies
over means of civilian defence, while the newspaper critics almost
entirely ignored the question of whether the Fighting Forces were
equipped with sufficient striking power to wage a modern war.
For the British in general were so pacifically inclined that they
could only think of war in terms of defence: counter-attack
seemed as unholy as the aggression that might provoke it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Still at Peace
In the Thirties the number and popularity of News Cinemas
greatly increased. The news-programme usually repeated itself
every hour and a half, rather than every three hours, and the
entrance fee was correspondingly reduced. They were News
Cinemas precisely in the sense that the newspapers were news
papers. The programme consisted usually of two short news reels
giving pictures of parades, disasters, sporting events, and so on;
a Walt Disney film for the comic strip; for feature articles, short
sequences on travel, fashion, natural history, industry, sport; often
an interview; musical interludes.
The last years of the Thirties were notable for some real im
provement in full-length British films. In 1938 there was Pygmal
ion , featuring Leslie Howard; Bernard Shaw himself adapted his
play for filming and won the American Academy of Motion Pic
tures Annual Award for the best scenario. There was also The
Citadel , starring Robert Donat, and adapted from A. J. Cronin s
realistic moral novel about a doctor s progress from a Welsh
mining village to a practice in Harley Street. Alfred Hitchcock
was the most skilful of British directors: in his thriller, The Lady
Vanishes , a high spot was an apparently typical Crisis-Conversa
tion between two Englishmen in the restaurant-car of a train, illus
trated by tactical exercises with lumps of sugar on the tablecloth.
The talk turned out to refer to the precarious position of the Eng
lish cricket eleven in a Test Match, which they were hurrying
from abroad to attend. When the enthusiasts reached Victoria
Station they were met with a poster: Rain Stops Play .
Many of the most talented British actors and actresses were
still drifting to Hollywood. Herbert Marshall, George Arliss, and
Edna Best had gone long before; Charles Laughton and Diana
407
408 STILL AT PEACE
Wynyard more recently; now younger people, such as Vivien
Leigh and Leslie Howard, were going too. Hollywood could offer
chances to actors, and produce films, with which Elstree, Denham,
Teddington, Eating, and the other British studios could not com
pete.
The highbrow vogue for German and Russian films was over;
French films were the most admired, for a witty quality which
was lacking in those of all other nations. The wit lay more in
the smooth, cynically sentimental treatment of situations, than in
the words for nothing could equal American- wisecracks, and,
in any case, few intellectuals understood French dialogue. La
Kermesse Heroique was perhaps the most appreciated French
film of 1937: it showed how the women of a prosperous town in
the Low Countries warded off the destruction of their homes
their husbands being too cowardly to defend them against the
savage Spaniards by giving the invaders (and themselves) a
thoroughly good time. This elegant defeatism agreed with a strong
current of contemporary opinion: that perhaps if one were nice
to the Germans and Italians in an unofficial way they might prove
to be gentlemen after all. In this sense the Chamberlain Govern
ment represented the cowardly husbands. Episodic films were a
French specialty: Sacha Guitry s autobiography and Un Garnet
de BaF, which followed up the very varied careers of several young
men who had written their names on a girl s dance-card. This was
the time when American hay-wire comedy was at its wildest: the
heartless and unnatural antics of the Marx Brothers giving their
numerous British fans the same sort of Surrealist frisson as Salvador
Dali was then handing out to New York window-shoppers.
British humorous plays inclined to farce: typical was a week
end country-house setting with several different types of conven
tional characters who invariably misunderstood each other, made
passes at one another s girls, got into difficulties with their Blimp-
like parents, and were accidentally shut in one another s bedrooms.
A variation on this type was Terence Rattigan s competent Trench
Without Tears . The country-house was a French college for
young diplomats with a comic French tutor and his conventionally
beautiful daughter. The lives of the three young men there the
dreaming idiot, the jolly-good-funster and the intelligent one
were disturbed by the arrival of a right-minded naval commander
STILL AT PEACE 409
and a feather-brained siren. The end of the resultant love-tangle
was conventionally ironical: the siren captured the intelligent one
and the dreaming idiot was won by the tutor s daughter. Trench
Without Tears ran in London for over two years.
Parody and topical satire were provided by the small revues:
the Little Revue and the Gate Revue, especially, which ran every
season at the theatres from which they took their names, with
occasional change of turns. Full-length plays were rarely satirical,
the only one to make a hit being an American social drama, The
Women by Claire Boothe; it was also filmed and printed in serial
form in a London evening newspaper. The popular Press debated
whether women were so cruel and cynical as Miss Boothe showed
them in Britain at least.
The theatres were providing a bewildering variety of entertain
ment: farces, revues, suburban comedy, period pieces, so-called
realistic dramas, religious plays, verse plays, revivals of classics,
thrillers, musical shows. There was an emotional play about the
next war : Idiot s Delight , in which the characters gave vent to
the prevalent anti-war feeling. They re all talking about security.
They re all jittery. So they get bigger cannons and sharper bay
onets. And that makes them more jittery. It doesn t seem to
make sense. And: Til tell you what else you can do in these tragic
circumstances. You can refuse to fight. Have you ever thought of
that possibility? You can refuse to use those weapons that they
have sold you! The Peace Pledge Union seized on such remarks
and reprinted them in pamphlets.
The plays of the whimsical Czech Carel Capek were also popu
lar in London: three of them, c The Insect Play , The White
Plague , and The Mothers dealt with war themes. But it was
very seldom that plays reflected serious contemporary currents of
thought; nor was this to be expected. They were written purely
as upper-middle-class entertainment. Producers played for safety.
A difficult play was unlikely to run for more than a week or two,
however encouraging the critics. As the period advanced it became
almost impossible to engage good companies for a play that did
not have a sporting chance of success, even if financial backing
could be found. Most productions were therefore lightweight
stuff with a backward slant to the pre-i9i4 sentimental level. Few
intelligent people went regularly to the theatres, except as a sockl
4 10 STILL AT PEACE
habit hard to break. Successful stage plays were usually filmed
after a time and could be seen more cheaply and more comfortably
in the cinemas. Actors on the whole were coming to prefer cinema
work to stage work: not only because it was better paid and made
less demands on the memory but because the result was less evan
escent and incorporated the best possible versions of each dramatic
sequence. Occasionally an actor or actress who had made a name
in the films returned temporarily to the stage, missing the thrill of
personally dominating an audience with voice or gesture. But few
or none returned for good. Except for small experimental groups
who drew special audiences intellectual, Left, or Trade Union
to small halls at cheap prices, and the keen provincial repertory
companies, which were graduate schools of dramatic art, the
British Theatre was as good as dead.
Managers of theatres and cinemas were even more alarmed by
the threat of commercial television than they had been by broad
casting. Their hostility threw television back on its own resources.
It had its own studios at Alexandra Palace and was financed out
of BJ5.C. revenue, but the number of viewers in 1939 was only
about 50,000. As an entertainment it was still chiefly a novelty;
though the successful relaying of public events, such as the Derby,
the Cup Final, and the University Boat Race, showed it as a prob
able rival to news-reels. Gaumont-British prepared to meet this
danger by equipping seventy of their cinemas with apparatus for
rediffusing television programmes. A poll among viewers showed
that the most popular television items were productions of plays,
and the studios therefore concentrated on these. Sets were still ex
pensive, reception still uncertain, and programmes still experi
mental when the new war broke out and the studios were closed
down.
The book-market, meanwhile, was being flooded with political
titles: Searchlight on Spain, Our Debt to Spain, The Spanish
Cockpit, Danger Spots of Europe, Europe in the Melting Pot,
Between Two Wars?, Britain Looks at Germany, Germany
What Next?, Blackmail or War?, Britain and the Dictators, Czechs
and Germans, Europe and the Czechs, What Hitler Wants, I Was
Hitler s Prisoner, I Married a German, and so on. Some of these
were sold in Penguin editions. Penguins were first published in
1936; they were excellently printed in the readable New Roman
STILL AT PEACE 411
type, which The Times had developed, and bound in stiff paper
covers. They sold at sixpence it was the first time that the public
had been able to get really cheap reprints of successful books still
in copyright.
Penguins also sold upper-class books such as Ernest Heming
way s A Fareivell to Ar?ns, Aldous Huxley s Crome Yellow, Liam
O Flaherty s The Informer, E. M. Forster s A Passage to India,
George Moore s Esther Waters, Norman Douglas s South Wind,
Andre Maurois s Ariel, to a huge self -improving public. Penguins
became a household word and the cheerful, orange-and-white
covers of their fiction were to be seen on every bookstall and at
every newsagents . The booksellers feared that Penguins might
diminish the sale of dearer books, though it was pointed out that
they reached a public which had never dreamt of paying ys. 6d.
for a novel and disliked the lending library system, and that buyers
of ys. 6d. novels would buy Penguins too. This was true, and
before three years had gone by one could scarcely find a bookshelf
in Britain which did not contain at least half a dozen Penguins.
Yet the fee that Penguin authors got was small; and though to be
in the series was held to be a fine advertisement, ordinary book
publishers arid literary agents were of opinion that, whatever the
social benefits of the Penguin system might be, financially it was
bad for publishers, booksellers, and authors alike. It was the same
complaint that manufacturers of small high-grade articles, particu
larly hardware, china and glass, made against Woolworth s cheap
lines.
Penguin Books soon launched other ventures. They produced
Pelicans, which were informative books on science, economics,
history, arts, sociology, and archaeology. Among the first Pelicans
were Bernard Shaw s Intelligent Wotmrfs Guide to Socialism,
Julian Huxley s Essays in Popular Science, Sir Leonard Woolley s
Digging Up the Past, H. G. Wells s Short History of the World,
Sir James Jeans s The Mysterious Universe, and Dr. Freud s
Psychotherapy of Everyday Life. Penguin Books also began to
commission writers to do Specials , described as books of topical
importance published within as short a time as possible from the
receipt of the manuscript. Some are reprints of famous books
brought up to date, but usually they are entirely new books pub
lished for the first time . Their subjects were chiefly international
4 12 STILL AT PEACE
crises and the problems of war and peace. Their authors were
expected to rush them off at top speed so that they would be on
the market when the crisis was at its height. Besides these specials,
Penguin Books produced illustrated classics Jane Austen, Daniel
Defoe, Herman Melville, etc., editions of Shakespeare s plays, and
guides to the counties of England.
Penguins had many, imitators, but none covered so wide a
range of subjects. Finding Penguin Books in possession of the
serious sixpenny market, they tended to concentrate on thrillers.
The wide sale of the informative and educational Pelicans, like
the success of the Left Book Club, showed that people wanted to
understand and to learn about current problems and the general
life of the world. Different aspects of contemporary life were
also being factually presented by writers of various trades and
professions. Journalists, doctors, and lawyers wrote autobiog
raphies from the point of view of their professional rather than
their private lives. Big successes in these years were Coming, Sir,
a waiter s autobiography, and Ifs Draughty m From by a London
taxi-driver, both dealing primarily with working conditions, and
two or three books by amateur housemaids university and Society
girls who entered domestic service in order to find out what it was
like. Intelligent ex-convicts also wrote up their prison experiences.
They described realistically the strict Victorian rules which still
governed English prisons and the brutalizing effect on the prison
ers, but without attempting to whip up hysterical feeling against
the prison-system or to glorify the convicts as martyrs. The in
telligent middle-class public far preferred such low-life books,
written by people who had actually gone through what they de
scribed, to romantic write-ups by professional journalists of the
Lowell Thomas, Harold Begbie, and William Le Queux tradition.
Some low-life fiction was read in these years, particularly the
new American short story. The stories of the American- Armenian,
William Saroyan, began to be popular in England in 1936 and
those of the American sports-columnist Damon Runyon in 1937.
Saroyan s were scarcely stories at all, but inconsequential mono
logues on life, love, and work by low-class American-Armenian
characters. Runyon s were farcical, rather long-winded anecdotes,
also told in the first person, about a group of gangsters, racing men,
and business men who haunted one of the lower-grade saloons
STILL AT PEACE 413
of New York. Both Saroyan and Runyon were admired for their
completely amoral, wise-cracking, slang-ridden treatment of the
well-worn themes of love, work, and crime. The slang especially
created a stir. E. C. Bendey accounted for it in an introduction
to one of Runyon s books: We produce little slang of our own
to-day: what we have is of old standing. Our borrowing in this
way is, I suppose, one of the results of the enormous impressions
made on us (whether we like it or not) by the vigour, the self-
sufficiency, the drama and melodrama of American life/ (E. C.
Bentley was the most English of contemporary writers, author of
the well-known parody of the stilted type of detective novel,
Trent s Last Case, and inventor of the only popular verse-form
that rivalled the Limerick the Clerihew . Clerihews were orig
inally chanted to psalm-tunes, hence their stanzaic irregularity; e.g.:
Sir Christopher Wren
Was dining with some men
He said: If any one calls
Tell him I m designing St. Paul s/)
People were also wanting factual information on political mat
ters, and feeling that they were not always getting it from the
mass-produced, Business-controlled, profit-making daily and
weekly Press. The hush-hush over Mrs. Simpson in the months
preceding the Abdication had made many people realize for the
first time that newspapers did not necessarily print the whole
news. The Left had long since developed its own methods of
countering the self -censorship of the Press by starting news
services of its own. Besides the sensational Daily Worker, there
was also the six-page, cyclostyled The Week, which offered its
subscribers cynically written inside information on the week s
international political manoeuvres. It often proved uncannily well-
informed upon the opinions, activities and importance of back
stage political leaders, and made a point of boasting of its unim
peachable connections. The Week had many imitators, issued by
people who were alarmed that the only source of inside informa
tion should lie in Communist hands. Commander Stephen King-
Hall, the son of an Admiral, himself an ex-naval officer and a
well-known political writer and broadcaster, began in 1938 to
publish a weekly bulletin, the K-H News Letter. This contained
4H STILL AT PEACE
personal views in essay-like form, rather than strictly factual in
formation. Nevertheless, by the middle of 1939 it had a circulation
of over 50,000. It was followed by many other news-letters. For
example, the Arrow, by a diplomatic correspondent; the Broad
sheet, by a distinguished lawyer; Father Desmond s Views Letter,
by an Anglo-Catholic ecclesiastic; In Plain English, by the medical
correspondent of The Times, who had views about finance as well
as about medicine; the Fleet Street News Letter-, the Diplomatic-
Political Correspondent-, and Empire sheets such as the Hong-
Kong News Letter and the Australian Considerations. All these
gave facts overlooked or suppressed by the newspapers, and repre
sented one man s personal interpretation of events or the views of
some important minority. They were a revival of the personal
news-letters which had been circulated among large groups of
friends or business associates in the seventeenth and eighteenth cen
turies. All were distributed by post to subscribers and none publicly
offered for sale on bookstalls or in the streets; this emphasized their
personal, inside appeal, and also protected them from retaliatory
action by the newspapers or the public characters they maligned.
Newspaper editors began to see that the public liked to feel
that it was getting the inside facts . Already in France Mme
Genevieve Tabouis of the anti-Fascist LOeuvre enjoyed a great
reputation for knowing what was happening behind the scenes ,
even though many of her statements and predictions proved un
founded. Her articles were published in England by the independ
ent-minded Sunday Referee, which some people bought solely for
that reason. Just before the war began, even the popular news
papers began to run Inside Information and Secret Service col
umns in which were presented special pieces of political informa
tion and conjecture in a way which suggested secret prowling
down the diplomatic corridors . It would be wrong to suggest
that the British were suddenly developing an overpowering desire
to know nothing but the facts. They were also looking for opti
mistic encouragement and for acknowledged authority to rely
on in everyday decisions and points of view. Part of the success
of news-letters was due to their avoidance of newspaper tricks
and rhetoric, which made them seem reliable. Yet almost all but
The Week kept up the same optimistic tones as the general Press.
A highly soothing influence was exercised by horoscopes.
STILL AT PEACE 415
They gave daily advice to people born within certain dates on
love matters, family matters, business matters, when to travel,
when to propose, when to get married, when to invest money.
They were forced by pressure* of space to break away from scien
tific astrology by paying no attention to the latitude and longi
tude, nor to the hour, day, or even year of the births for which
their horoscopes were cast. They even ventured into political
prediction. The horoscopes of political leaders were drawn, and
the aspect and conjunctions of the stars on particular dates con
sidered from these, solemn conclusions were reached as to the
date, the character, and the consequences of the next crisis.
Towards the end of the Thirties nearly all popular newspapers
were publishing horoscopes. An exception was the Dally Herald,
which even after its regeneration under Odham s management
continued to regard them as Capitalist dope. Later, horoscopes
were chiefly a feature of Sunday newspapers, all of which except
the Sunday Times and the Observer, were publishing them by
1938. A great number of people from every class studied them
with religious care especially women. Men were more ashamed
of confessing themselves superstitious. The Spectator, however,
observed in January 1939: Business men of position are known
to refuse to sign papers or to make important decisions, should
a certain day be indicated as unlucky.* The most famous astrolo
ger was R. H. Naylor of the Sunday Express, whose well-featured
column, when it first appeared, was illustrated by a photograph
of himself, middle-aged, bespectacled, quietly lighting his pipe,
a box of matches in his left hand, looking as respectable and
reliable as any bank manager. Naylor also wrote for a sixpenny
monthly magazine Prediction, which contained articles on palm
istry, phrenology, numerology, graphology, clairvoyance, spir
itualism, and hypnotism. One Sunday newspaper boasted that it
had obtained the services of the one and only Petulengro, the
Gipsy Oracle; a rival countered this by announcing the engage
ment of no less an authority than Old Moore himself .Old Moore s
was the best known annual almanack; it had made its reputation
in Victorian times by correctly prophesying snow on Derby Day.
Unfortunately nine different and conflicting Old Moore s were
published, the name never having been copyrighted. Each chose to
regard itself as the only genuine and original one. All sold well
416 STILL AT PEACE
around Christmas-time. Sir Thomas Overbury had written three
centuries before:
An Almanack Maker
Is the worst pan of an Astronomer.
But as the Spectator sagely pointed out: Times of fear and doubt
and uncertainty make even educated men and women seek to
lift the veil off the future and find guidance and reassurance con
cerning things to come.
A new illustrated weekly magazine, Picture Post, was founded
in 1938. It was a British version of the American magazine Life,
which set out to give documentary photographs of American
and foreign life, accompanied by short, incisive comment. Life s
technique of photo- journalism was derived from German experi
ments, begun about 1926, when the miniature Leica camera was
put on the market. With the fast, accurate, and unobtrusive Leica
the news-photographer could take snapshots of altogether unsus
pecting sitters imposed studies of politicians and other notabilities
by Dr. Salomon at first created a sensation. As the art magazine
the Studio remarked some ten years later: His unprecedentedly
candid camera snapped the mounting cigar-ash of conference
tables, the dishevelled glasses of long drawn-out banquets, the
weary humanity of the great off their guard, a smile, a gesture, the
droop of a boiled shirt, that were not posed, but actual and re
vealing. The candid camera was turned upon events and situa
tions as well as upon notabilities. Stefan Lorant, the editor of the
Milnchner Illustrierte Presse, began to publish series of photo
graphs which presented whole situations and problems pictorially.
Lorant believed that people should be photographed as they really
were, not as they would want to appear, and that the camera
should be used like a reporter s notebook to record the lives of all
kinds of men and women. He came to England after the rise of
the Nazi party and helped to found Picture Post. This weekly,
like the American Lif e and the French Match, was concerned with
portraying life realistically. The picture-pages in daily newspapers
were now similarly used: their photographs, largely contributed by
minicam amateurs, were no longer mere illustrations of the day s
news, but had intrinsic news value. Even The Times and later
STILL AT PEACE 417
on the Times Literary Supplement began to admit photographs,
though The Ti?nes still preferred choice pictures of the English
countryside and large country houses.
The British and French imitators of Life, not having the same
financial backing, experience, or command of advertisements, fell
as short of the original as did the imitators of Time. It was the
Time company that had launched Life. Time itself had started
on an absurdly small capital in the early Twenties, but was in a
position to announce that it expected to publish Life at a con
siderable loss for the first year of issue. Its imitators could not
afford the best copy-writers available, nor the quality of printing
that would do justice to their photographs. Picture Post attempted
at the start to cater for the intelligent populace, as Life did: but
as had happened so often before to ambitious new periodicals in
Britain, the response was discouraging. The dead-alive reactions of
the common people to vital topics raised was reflected in its weekly
post-bag. Picture Post grew less intellectual , and its circulation
rose to a million a week. Lorant also provided pictorial vaudeville
in his monthly, Lilliput, a refugee version of Querschnitt.
It was rather to The Times, Daily Telegraph, Observer, and
Sunday Times that intelligent people sent letters. If these papers
had impartially printed all the well-informed letters that came in,
rather than a picked selection confirming the general editorial
policy, political and national history, especially during the Abdi
cation, Non-intervention, and Munich Crises, might have taken a
very different course. This partiality was forced on the select Press
by the knowledge that any opposition to the line taken by the
Government would be considered by them as against the National
Interest and that, as a punishment, news from Governmental
sources would be withheld from any offending journal. The Press
was not censored; it was coerced.
There was a fairly active form of censorship for American
periodicals. Postal subscribers did not have their copies tampered
with in the mails, but on several occasions, during the Abdication
crisis and after, people who bought copies of Time and other
American news magazines from the bookstalls found whole pages
torn out. Censorship of political films was an old story. Propa
ganda dramas that were thought likely to cause a breach of the
peace such as Battleship Potemkin and other Russian dramas,
418 STILL AT PEACE
had been forbidden public showing in the early Twenties; now
in the Thirties there was a ban even on straight commentaries,
such as the Spanish War picture, England Expects , which showed
the bombing of British ships, and a couple of issues of the March
of Time they were held to present the European war-danger too
realistically. The censorship often seemed biased in its view of
what was likely to cause a breach of the peace, and what was not.
In the early Twenties, though Battleship Potemkin was banned,
anti-Bolshevist propaganda films were allowed, as has been noted
one was even run through in the House of Commons to the
assembled members. And at the same time as a March of Time on
the subject of Nazi Germany was forbidden, by request of the
German Embassy, a news-film edited by the historian, Professor
G. P. Gooch, was shown at all news-theatres, giving a pro-Nazi
version of Germany s claim to her lost Colonies. Photography was
no longer merely a science or a trade: it was an art, and took
itself very seriously, even claiming its Old Masters Daguerre,
Lewis Carroll, Julia Cameron. The same potential aesthetic value
was claimed for detailed close-ups of actuality gutters in the
rain, cats in the garbage bin, or dirty crockery in a restaurant sink
as for romantic corn-wagons waiting at rustic mills, moon
scapes, and female nudes. Abstract and surrealist photographs were
also in vogue, and camera portraits were no longer regarded as
album items or silver-framed mantelpiece ornaments: they were
now mounted and framed and hung on walls with artistic delibera
tion, like paintings. The Queen herself graciously honoured a May-
fair fashion by allowing herself to be photographed by Cecil
Beaton, whose work was distinguished for its tasteful composi
tion ; his sitters were arranged in relation to carefully composed
backgrounds and a few choice neo- Victorian objects.
Photography as a science 3 and as an aid to science, made great
advances. Chemicals were analysed by X-ray diffraction and spec-
troscopic methods. Infra-red photography was used in criminology,
botany, and in the examination of documents and paintings; aerial
photography in geographical surveys; microphotography in all
kinds of delicate work. After the Depression of 1931 advertisers
began to prefer illustrative photographs, for black and white
reproduction, to original drawings by artists: they were both
more effective and cheaper. Colour photography was coming only
STILL AT PEACE 419
slowly into trade use; eyes trained to interpret colour in terms of
black and white were shocked by what seemed the unnatural
emphasis of the colour photograph, though in effect this did not
radiate nearly the same amount of colour as the subject taken.
American advertising carried far more photographs than British,
both coloured and black and white, in proportion to letterpress.
The Studio remarked on this point in 1937: As British advertising
accepts the powerful influence of the U.S.A. practice, similar de
velopments are to be expected here/ By this time it was taken
for granted not only in business but in all departments of every
day life that the United States should set the course and the pace,
and Great Britain follow.
Books were being far better illustrated, especially travel books.
General panoramas had gone out of fashion but intensely detailed
bled photographs were used printed to cover the whole of the
page, without a margin or a surrounding black line. This gave an
impression of generous and intimate reality. Much else had been
happening in book production. Not long after the war there had
been a revival of interest in typography and wood-cuts, which
caused a boom in extravagantly got-up limited editions. Some of
these were printed in adaptations of antique type, some in specially
designed, simple, modern type; fine expensive hand-made paper
was used, calf and vellum bindings, and lithographic illustrations.
The Depression put an end to this boom and many of the recently
founded printing presses went out of business. Some publishers,
however, had meanwhile learned to take an intelligent interest in
the selection of type and in the lay-out and decoration of pages.
A director of one of the youngest and most successful publish
ing firms said: *The publisher, in assuming full responsibility for
his books, has discovered two virtues as a result of his personal
efforts: the well-produced book that has character and, hardly less
important, the "house-style" ... he designs them all, either con
sciously or with a natural style that he cannot avoid, in such a
way as to make them recognizable as members of one family/
Another new feature in book production during the period
was the use of book-jackets. As late as 1928 the Studio was refer
ring to them as a novel feature that has already attained impor
tance . They soon showed a vast variety of colours and designs:
simple and complex, abstract and representational, aggressively
420 STILL AT PEACE
modern and sentimentally period . More than anything else,
jackets served to brighten up bookshelf windows; and were found
by publishers travellers to exercise an increasing influence on
sales.
The factual, realistic, Leftward march of prose-books con
tinued, yet without arriving at any remarkably new landscape in
literature, or providing any notable new figures to people one if
found. The poets and politicians of a period usually give a valuable
clue to its character. The politicians have been presented in the
last chapter. Our last backward glance at the literature of the
period will therefore be at the work of the poets. Most of the
prominent elder ones were now dead: Charles Doughty, Sir Wil
liam Watson, Robert Bridges, Thomas Hardy, A. E. Housman,
and W. B. Yeats. John Masefield was now Poet Laureate, but
writing chiefly in prose. The middle generation T. S. Eliot,
Walter de la Mare, W. H. Davies, the Sitwells had all either
almost or wholly stopped writing poems. The two chief creative
literary magazines had ceased publication: the pontifical London
Mercury and the learned Criterion. Most of the small periodicals
of more recent foundation, such as New Verse, had likewise been
put out of action by the end of 1939. What was happening to the
English literary world? Was it dying, or merely in hibernation?
Some seemed to regard it as already dead. W. H. Auden, the
leading Left poet, had migrated to the United States; so had Chris
topher Isherwood. Louis MacNeice soon followed. (In the last
two peace-years, Auden had collaborated with both of these in
boyish, informal travel scrapbooks, written partly in light verse,
partly in light prose, but all in saleable journalese.) It was not only
the youthful idols of the Thirties who were going. Some estab
lished men of letters, such as Aldous Huxley, went too. In the
gathering storm of Europe s crises the United States stood out as
a safe and lively place of refuge. Vera Brittain, the Feminist and
Pacifist leader, wrote a book, Thrice a Stranger, in 1938, about her
visits to the New World and her changing attitudes to it. She con
cluded with these lyrical words of hopeful admiration: Thirteen
years ago America appeared to me in the guise of an antagonist.
Nine years later she became my friend; to-day she represents the
beloved refuge to which I would gladly entrust the lives that I
hold most dear. From the forward direction of her aspiring, invinc-
STILL AT PEACE 421
ible spirit, freed from the impulse of death that leads ancient cul
tures to compass their own destruction, arises one sure and cer
tain hope that for those whom she shelters, the dawn of to-morrow
will break. This was a new feeling for an English writer to
express: none in the Twenties, or even in the early Thirties, could
possibly have brought himself to look upon the United States as
the home of culture. Yet now it was a common feeling among the
intelligent few not shared, however, by the majority, who still
regarded Americans with jealous, condescending and irritated, yet
proudly admiring suspicion.
Among those who remained, another member of the much-
publicized Left trio of the early Thirties, Cecil Day Lewis, had
become rather novelist, reviewer, pamphleteer, lecturer, and
platform-speaker than poet. Stephen Spender alone of the three
was still keeping his flannel-textured Red flag of culture flying
but the colour had not proved fast. Baldwin in July 1936 had
appealed to the Congress of British Empire Universities at Cam
bridge to produce more poets. New poets were always, of course,
appearing, but most of these came to a dead end as soon as they
left the universities, which were their breeding-places. One made
literary news: the crabbed and dark-minded Welshman, Dylan
Thomas, whose poems were strewn with wild, organic, telescoped
images, underneath which perhaps ran a submerged stream of
poetic thought. His poems were the subject of a Press controversy
on difficult poetry ; Edith Sitwell came out as his champion.
Advanced literary critics also pointed hopefully to the turbulent
and ecstatic torrent of verse on such themes as dreams, love, and
the fate of Spain which spurted from George Barker s pen. Then
there was a slim volume by Charles Madge, co-founder of Mass
Observation, which began with astrological and dream poems and
ended with prose fragments like newspaper cuttings; and the
punning, pseudo-scientific schoolboy work of William Empson,
a synthetic writer.
Poetry in England was not dead, but it was in a bad way. The
experimental stage and the Left stage had both been passed some
time before war broke out and nothing new had replaced them.
Like everyone else in the last two peace-years, the poets in gen
eral were in a state of expectant, fearful, inactive confusion. A
few, however, contributed to the big critical compendium The
422 STILL AT PEACE
World and Ourselves, edited by Laura Riding in 1938, the con
clusion of which was that the tragic absurdity of public events
was due to a moral failure among the "outside people the in
stitutionally minded directors of affairs; but equally to a failure
among independent minded and sensitive inside people who
should include most women and all poets to give the outside
people a lead. The remedy suggested was a continued insistence
by the inside people on personal integrity an attitude to be com
municated from friend to friend through the close network of
real friendships that made up society. This minority report con
flicted with the popular view which, lumping painters, sculptors,
musicians, and poets together under the single category of "artists ,
denied that to be a good artist one needed necessarily to be a
good person. The most admired poet of the time, W. B. Yeats,
had in 1935 rejected the suggestion that he should incorporate in
his Oxford Book of Modern Verse any of the poems of James
Reeves, who with Norman Cameron was among the few who still
maintained poetic sincerity and dignity. He commented on
Reeves s The Natural Need: Too true, too sincere. The Muse pre
fers the liars, the gay and warty lads. Yeats s younger colleagues of
the Thirties had indeed not fallen short of this monstrous speci
fication.
To be a poet was no longer a popular distinction, as it had been
even in the early Twenties. Hardly a poet now earned enough by
the sale of collected poems to keep him in tobacco. The crown had
passed to the novelist, who was essayist, dramatist, pamphleteer,
prose-poet, historian, all in one. The novel became industrialized:
novels succeeded less on their literary merits than on the sales-
power that author and publisher could exert by direct and indirect
advertisement and *pulF. Useful instruments to this end were the
professional reviewers, whose chief gift was knowing whom it was
wise to praise or safe to slam. Their names grew bloated from con
stant quotation in publishers announcements. In 1936 the head
of one of the largest British publishing-houses congratulated his
shareholders on the valuable contracts secured that year not only
with well-known novelists, but with novelists who are also re
viewers .
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Rain Stops Play, 1939
By 1939 it was calculated that some 25,000 refugees had entered
the country from Germany and Austria, some of them illegally,
since 1933. The stupider elements of the Right worked up an
agitation against the alleged competition of refugees for jobs
which Englishmen could do just as well. Some sections of the
professional classes were particularly indignant that German and
Austrian doctors and dentists should be allowed to practise in
Britain. Serious weeklies then rallied to the defence of the refugee,
under the old cry of England, the asylum for the persecuted .
The Spectator observed that a great many of the refugees who
reached Britain were either highly trained men or else had suffi
cient funds to be more of an asset than a liability to the country.
The Manchester Guardian quoted the case of three Austrians who
had opened a factory which was then employing two hundred
British workmen, thus helping to solve the unemployment prob
lem. It was contended that refugees were transferring whole new
industries to Britain the Leipzig fur trade, for example, almost
entirely built up by Jews, had been brought to London. In north
eastern England refugee Jews were setting up a number of new
factories for furnishing materials; and dresses which had formerly
been bought by London department stores from foreign firms
could now be bought from the same firms in Britain. But this
accounted only for the richer refugees. Poorer ones had to huddle
together in back rooms and kick their heels in the offices of
Refugee Committees. There was little sympathy felt for these,
especially when they fell foul of the law. In 1938 the magistrate
of the Old Street police-court sentenced three refugees, one ^ of
them a pregnant woman, to six months hard labour for entering
u 4 2 3
4^4 RAIN STOPS PLAY, 1939
the country without an official permit. He described the influx of
refugees as an outrage .
There had always been a certain amount of latent anti-foreign
feeling in Britain: this was often strongly expressed among middle-
class people in the districts where the refugees tended to settle
Hampstead, in London, for instance, where a joke was current
that if colonies were to be given to Hitler a start should be made
there, so many Germans having already taken up residence in the
borough. Mosley s Fascists tried to exploit anti-Semitic feeling
in the East End, but with the surprising effect, rather, of making
heroes of the kikes . They had been disliked for their terrible in-
dustriousness, their habit of spending a large proportion of their
income on showy dress, and the low wages that they offered in
their shops. The popular Press was on the whole sympathetic
towards the Jews rather for anti-Nazi than for pro-Semitic
reasons.
What was to be done with the Jews was a much-debated ques
tion. Guerilla-warfare was in progress in Palestine, where the
Arab Nationalists were strongly opposed to the partition of their
country into Jewish and Arab states, as the Peel Commission had
recommended. The Government could not make up its mind about
Palestine: a second Commission reported in 1938 that partition
was impracticable. Meanwhile the military were left to deal with
well-organized marauding Arab bands as best they could, without
either inflaming Arab feelings against British rule throughout the
Near East or over-exciting the Jews. Before the outbreak of war
the Italian-financed Arab revolt had been quelled, but the prob
lem was still unsolved: the Jews formed a prosperous, industrial
ized modern community, the Arabs of whom there were twice
as many a poor, scattered, chiefly agricultural and labouring
class. No co-operation between them seemed possible. Jewish
farms were a standing annoyance to the Arab: tractors, artesian
wells, nitrates, selected seeds, Zionist zeal, raised enormous crops
from the same soil that he scratched with his plough for the sake
of a few stunted sheaves. Bare-kneed and bare-faced Jewish farm-
girls disgusted him. One thing the Government had decided: Jew
ish emigration into Palestine was to be restricted. But where the
flow of emigration should be directed instead, nobody knew. Plans
RAIN STOPS PLAY, 1939 425
had been discussed for settling 10,000 Jews in British Guiana, and
more in Tanganyika, Madagascar, Ecuador, and other distant parts
of the world, but no definite arrangements had been made. Zionists
took a firm line in the matter: Balfour during the war had prom
ised them a National Home in Palestine , and they chose to read
this in as meaning consisting of. It must be all Palestine or
nothing.
The Jewish problem was a permanent topic, taken up only
occasionally by the Press, when there was a dramatizable riot in
Palestine. In 1939, for example, the Sphere observed, hardly in
the Christian spirit: The Church of the Annunciation is one of
the sights of Nazareth, the town that has suddenly leapt into the
news with the murder of British officials. A similar topic was
the unrest among the negro population of the British West Indies,
where a Government Commission was studying the social effects
of the decline of the sugar-exporting industry. Accounts of strikes
in Jamaica and of the exploits of the negro agitator Bustamente
in Trinidad were all that the Press usually printed on the subject.
Home news occupied more space. It was front-page news, for
example, when Oxford won the boat-race in April 1938 for the
second time in succession after a thirteen-year series of defeats.
Shortly afterwards, a Brighton clerk compelled his young son to
hold red-hot coals in his hands in punishment for some trivial
offence. A case was brought against him by the Royal Society
for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (soon to be renamed
for the Protection and Care of Children, in order to remove the
grounds for Dr. Goebbels accusation that the English was a cruel
race ) anc [ he was fined 25. This unusual incident won the
clerk so much publicity that he lost his job, and had to move with
his family to another district; the child received an enormous
fan-mail. Then there was the case of Mrs. Elsie Borders, the
Tenants K.C. . She was sued by a Building Society for refusing
to pay instalments on a mortgage on her house. She defended the
case herself on the ground that the condition of the house when
she bought it had been misrepresented. Several Tenants Defence
Leagues then sprang up for protection against the Building
Societies, which had now become a great power.
The most sensational political case was that of Duncan Sandys,
426 RAIN STOPS PLAY, 1939
a Conservative M.P. and son-in-law of Winston Churchill, in
July 1938. In June he had produced figures showing that the
state of the country s anti-aircraft defences was unsatisfactory,
and had sent them in a memorandum to Hore-Belisha at the War
Office. Hore-Belisha was embarrassed and called in the Attorney-
General, asking him to warn Sandys, who was a Territorial
officer, that he had rendered himself liable to a court martial and
two years imprisonment under the Official Secrets Act for being
in possession of confidential data. Sandys asserted his right as an
M.P., and refused to disclose the source of his figures. A hushed-up
inquiry was then held, but the case gave two handles for attacks
upon the Government. Britain s anti-aircraft defences had been
revealed to be in a dangerous state of unpreparedness, and the
Government had been caught trying to suppress the truth. The
Press attack, unlike that in the House, was not directed against
Hore-Belisha, who was the most popular figure in the Ministry
and was held to have acted as he did merely to call attention to
the problem of the Service member .
The summer of 1938 was passing with the usual news of holiday
crowds and cricket matches, but by August the difficult-looking
word Czechoslovakia had begun to appear daily in the newspaper
columns. Little was known of this place except as a country which
apparently exported cheap gloves, glassware, and boots. News
paper readers now learned with interest that it was a democratic
country near Austria which had come into being as a result of
the Peace of Versailles while they were busy reading about
Hawker s Atlantic flight, Sir Alec Black s "The Panther , and Lady
Diana Manner s wedding. Soon they learned more: the Sudeten
German minority, encouraged by the Nazis, was claiming auton
omy from the Chechoslovakian government, the Hungarians were
rumoured to be pressing their claims for frontier revision, and the
Slovaks were proving far from loyal to this composite state. So
serious had the situation become that the British Government sent
Lord Runciman, a former President of the Board of Trade and a
big shipowner, as a neutral observer, to appease, if possible, both
the Czechs and the Sudeten Germans and somehow prevent a
European conflagration. Unfortunately it was not to be a simple
matter of redrafting the constitution of the Czech state: Germany
was involved, and Hitler was letting it be clearly understood that
RAIN STOPS PLAY, 1939 427
the future of the Sudeten Germans was the exclusive concern of
the Third Reich.
Already people were thinking of the peace of Europe as hang
ing upon Hitler s words. Every speech that he made was given
enormous publicity in the British Press: HITLER SPEAKS ON WED
NESDAY, HITLER SPEAKS TO-MORROW, HITLER SPEAKS, HITLER S
SPEECH. Not that he was yet generally thought of as an enemy;
he ^ seemed only an unpleasantly dynamic element in the world
ultimately manageable if the proper tactics were adopted. But
what were the proper tactics? Most Conservatives agreed that he
was a menace to the status quo y but that Britain could not stop
him, on the Continent at least, and that therefore he must be
appeased. And, after all, why even preserve the status quo ? Were
not many of his claims justified? The Germans had been given a
raw deal at Versailles by the French and that bounder Lloyd
George and they were a great people, so nearly akin to the
British! The Left, on the other hand, persistently depreciated
Hitler s power: his regime was far from firmly established, they
thought, he was bluffing and his bluff should be called. If only the
Government could be compelled to take a strong line, he would
topple down at once. And many intelligent non-Left people felt
the same way. It is difficult to say at what stage in the story they
were still right.
Yet on the whole the British were encouraged by the Press to
remain blindly optimistic. The Sunday Express, for example, on
the 4th September 1938: Crisis oif till a Week To-morrow. No
Sensations Expected. The country could pass its week-end in
peace, and if it did have a sneaking feeling that perhaps the
peace would not last for long, there was the Maginot Line in
France to restore its confidence. All newspapers were insisting
on the unconquerable strength of this bulwark of freedom and
on the indissolubility of Franco-British unity, which had just been
sealed by the visit of the King and Queen to Paris.
A week later events took a more serious turn. Who Stands
With Me? Asks Hitler , was one headline; others were Hitler s
Ambassadors Sound Doubtful Nations! New British Defence
Measures Likely To-morrow. To-morrow s Fateful Nuremberg
Speech. For the British public Hitler had at last ceased to be the
funny little liar with the Chaplin moustache and the drooping
RAIN STOPS PLAY, 1939
lock of hair: he was the leader of Europe s other camp, now for
the first time generally seen to be separated almost unbridgeably
from the Franco-British camp.
Crowds were gathering anxiously in Downing Street, but the
newspapers preferred to treat of The Brighter Side . The Daily
Express, for instance, reported: The crowd outside 10 Downing
Street was amused yesterday. Some time after the Ministers had
left, the door opened and a trim maid came out. After looking
round she proceeded to shine the door-knocker and the brass
plate. The crowd laughed and faded away. Yet the leader in
the same issue admitted: In 1918 we were marching to victory,
our courage high. In 1938 we are disturbed and distressed, asking
each other whether there will be war and dreading the answer.*
Nobody except the extreme Left felt quite sure why Britain
should go to war, if at all. Who are them Sizzeks, anyway? as
country people asked. What right had Sizzeks to rule over
Germans (it was overlooked that the Sudetens had never formed
part of Germany), and why should they not make concessions?
The Government itself was already taking this point of view.
Sir John Simon in a speech at Lanark declared that the Czechs
should be pressed to make concessions, their country divided
into cantons and put on a federal basis. The Times went even
further than this: it published a feeler, suggesting that the Sudeten
districts should be ceded outright to Germany. The Daily Mail
agreed, but democratically maintained that a plebiscite should be
held first. The Manchester Guardian, on the other hand, pro
duced a plan for the transference of the Nazi-minded population
of Sudentenland to Germany, and for a joint guarantee of Czecho
slovakia s frontiers by Britain, France, and Russia. The News
Chromcle was bellicose: a firm note should be sent to Hitler to
let him know in unequivocal terms that if Czechoslovakia were
invaded Britain, France, and Russia would march. The Daily
Express asserted complete faith in Chamberlain and announced
that it would endorse whatever he decided to do. The policy of
this journal is to be sympathetic with those in trouble and at the
same time to look after our own affairs. . . . For us, in Britain, in
the midst of these troubled times, it is the duty of all, every man
and woman, to stand behind the Prime Minister, to support his
RAIN STOPS PLAY, 1939 4 2 9
deeds, to ratify his acts, to uphold his position. 5 Yet few of its read
ers considered this view extraordinary or unworthy of a paper that
had always described itself as independent!
Chamberlain was playing up well to the role forced on him.
When, on September ijth, he set off with Sir Horace Wilson, the
head of the Civil Service, from Heston airport to interview Hitler
at Berchtesgaden, he felt himself to be the saviour of European
peace; and the Press in almost every country presented him as such
umbrella for olive-branch. It was the first time that Chamberlain
had flown in an aeroplane; also the first time that any British Prime
Minister had gone to the Continent post-haste to sue for peace.
After his return there followed a week of suspense: had he suc
ceeded? Might he not even have pulled a fast one on Hitler? Then
for the second time he flew to Germany, this time to Godesberg/
to draw up definite terms, pressure having meanwhile been put on
the Czechs to ensure their acceptance. It was now quite clear that
Hitler was winning the trick: the Left raged furiously against
Chamberlain for having given way, and so did Eden, Churchill,
and other dissident Conservatives. Churchill said: Acceptance of
Herr Hitler s terms involves the prostration of Europe before the-
Nazi power, of which the fullest advantage will certainly be taken. 5
But The Times on the i9th tried to justify acceptance on moral
and humanitarian grounds: The proposed modifications of the
peace treaties, if they were now carried through with general con
sent, would illustrate and strengthen the principle of change
achieved without violence/
The Czech Government on the 2 ist made the sorrowful official
observation: *You shall to-day level no reproaches at those who
have forsaken us in our hour of direst need. History will pass judge
ment on the events of these days. But the British public did not
think of itself as forsaking anybody. It prayed hard (literally, for
there was a sudden revival of church-going) that the Czechs would
not prove obstinate. The Daily Express on the 25th: New Hope
Rises in Europe. Will the Czechs Accept Hitler s Ultimatum?
What he Asks: the Evacuation of Sudetenland by October ist.
Czechs May Refuse Because the Time-Limit May Cost them Their
Guns. Prague s Fear: Losing her Maginot Line. The onus of decid
ing for peace or for war was thus laid wholly upon the Czechs.
43 RAIN STOPS PLAY, 1939
Many British, meanwhile, had been terrified by tales of the might
of the German air force (corroborated by Colonel Lindbergh, then
in London and just back from Germany), and knew only too well
that their own rearmament plans were hopelessly inadequate. Fran
tic appeals were made through loudspeakers in cinemas, at social
functions, and at swimming galas that people should go and have
their gas-masks fitted. Trenches were hastily dug in the London
parks and steel shelters hurriedly erected. The surprised and
puzzled populace was keyed up unwillingly for war.
How grateful they were, then, that Chamberlain saved them!
What a wonderful man he was! And at the age of sixty-nine! He
played his hand superbly: as he was delivering a foreboding speech
in the House of Commons a providential message from Hitler was
handed him by an attendent, fixing the date for another conference.
The meeting at Munich followed on the 29th; this time Mussolini
was present, too, as a self-styled arbiter, and Daladier as an uncom
fortable spectator. Terms were drawn up, stricter than those first
sketched out at Godesberg, and forced upon the unconsulted
Czechs. The Times admitted, with a show of sympathetic under
standing: The general character of the terms submitted to the
Czech Government for their consideration cannot in the nature of
things be expected to make a strong prima -facie appeal to them.
But few people were worrying about them Sizzeks .
In Britain, Munich at first seemed a victory. Peace had been pre
served. Appeasement had triumphed. The umbrella had been
mightier than the sword. Had not Hitler given a solemn under
taking that these were his last territorial demands? All was well
again. As Chamberlain himself said: C I have no doubt, looking back,
that my visit alone prevented an invasion for which everything was
prepared/ Thanks to Chamberlain, wrote the now middle-aged
columnist Lord Castlerosse, thousands of young men will live. I
shall live. The Spectator declared enthusiastically that Chamber
lain deserved the Nobel Peace Prize. When he arrived back from
Munich he was greeted with heartfelt cheers, so the Press reported,
at Heston airport. An independent-minded observer, however, re
ported that he had never seen so shameful a sight in his life the
huge crowd seemed ready to roll on the ground like worshippers at
the Juggernaut festival to let Chamberlain ride in glory over them.
The Week reported that Chamberlain s dominating effect on his
colleagues in the Cabinet was due to his tremendous sense of being
RAIN STOPS PLAY, 1939 43 1
a chosen vessel of the Deity; while they were confused and fright
ened.
The Daily Telegraph (lately amalgamated with the moribund
Morning Post) and the Daily Mirror, which alone of the big Con
servative dailies had taken the Churchill point of view during the
Crisis, now fell into line with the rest of the Press. They loyally
accepted the course that had been taken as the only possible one.
But in October the British conscience began to prick. Hitler had
now occupied the ceded regions, and more besides: and the Hun
garians and the Poles were taking their share of the spoils. The
Cabinet itself was rumoured to be dissatisfied with the agreement,
and on October 2nd Duff Cooper resigned: I profoundly distrust
our foreign policy, he said. So did many others who had not had
Duff Cooper s opportunity, first as War Minister and then as First
Lord of the Admiralty, to give foreign policy a substantial backing
of force. Then Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, in a speech at
Edinburgh declared that Chamberlain had had to choose between
war and sacrificing the Czechs, and that he had chosen right. The
Germans had won, he said, by an overwhelming show of force.
Why had Britain, too, not been able to make a show of over
whelming force? people asked. Why, in the forceful phrase of The
Week, had Chamberlain turned all four cheeks to Hitler? The
clouds of war had indeed rolled away, but they left an uncomfort
able, doubting, fearful nation. What would happen next? At the
end of November, during a speech by the Italian Foreign Minister,^
Count Ciano, Italians began screaming for Corsica, Nice, Tunisia,
Djibouti . But of course that was ridiculous. At Lloyds the odds
were 32 to i against war within a year.
The eleven months which came between the Munich Confer
ence and the German invasion of Poland were a confused and in
glorious period. Immediate sense of relief was followed by a feel
ing of humiliated anger, and then by a purblind apathy. The con
temporary by-elections showed a constant fall in the Government s
majority due, however, more to this apathy than to any strong
public disgust with the appeasement policy. Rearmament was re
ported to be proceeding at an accelerated rate, A.R.P. services to
be expanding and the Ministry of Health working hard at plans for
evacuating children from danger areas. The Press successfully dis-
43 2 RAIN STOPS PLAY, 1939
pelled the crisis atmosphere by dwelling on pleasantly trivial things,
such as the arrival at the Zoo from Central Asia of the cuddly, parti
coloured Giant Panda, the first ever brought to England alive.
The most warlike activities were those of the Irish Republican
Army, which was now blowing up telephone boxes and plateglass
windows in large British cities, and planting time-bombs in suit
cases at left-luggage offices.
Christmas passed with its turkey and plum pudding and shop
ping rush, as always. But in January came news of the fall of Bar
celona. General Franco s forces had already in April 1938 driven
a wedge between Catalonia and the central Republican area of
Madrid and Valencia. Now, after a terrific offensive with the aid
of strong mechanized forces supplied by Germany and Italy, he
burst through and routed the starved Catalan Army. Then began
a painful, straggling exodus into France of hundreds of thousands
of militiamen and refugees, many of them fighting a continuous
rearguard action and all persistently bombed. The French unwill
ingly admitted them, herding the greater number like animals into
insanitary concentration camps, where they were well guarded be
hind barbed wire by Senegalese troops. Britain recognized Franco
Spain at the end of February and a month later Madrid was taken
over by a group of Army officers. The Spanish Republican cabinet
fled, and Madrid surrendered. Thus ended the Spanish War. The
French were doing what they could by a merciless neglect of their
uninvited guests to persuade as many of them as possible to throw
themselves on Franco s mercy. The shocking story of the Spanish
camps in France was not allowed to appear in the Conservative
Press, lest Franco-British amity should be endangered.
The tragedy did not arouse nearly so much feeling in Britain as
it might have done a year earlier. The Left said: We told you so ,
and accused the Government of presenting the totalitarian coun
tries with one more ally for the impending war; but the Left had
been saying that for years Britain herself only a few months be
fore had come so near catastrophe that more than the end of a
foreign civil war was needed to shake her fatalistic paralysis. British
military opinion, and Conservative opinion generally, saw the result
as a triumph for professional armies over an undisciplined Red
rabble not as the victory of a rather clumsily handled mechanized
army, supported by inferior infantry, over a superior infantry with
RAIN STOPS PLAY, 1939 433
no air or artillery support worth mentioning. By the end of the war
. Italian forces in Spain numbered 100,000; the Germans never had
more than 10,000 there at a time, but these were all technicians,
constantly withdrawn and replaced as soon as they had passed the
course in practical fighting which was to prepare them for the war
with France and Britain.
On January 3oth Hitler made a speech demanding back the lost
German colonies; the next day Chamberlain pronounced it not
the speech of a man who was preparing to throw Europe into an
other crisis . He was wrong. Hitler occupied what was left of the
Czech state on March 1 5th. The action, correctly forecast ten days
earlier by the Daily Worker, was to have been expected after the
events of the previous Septembe 
