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Britain between the wars

London Belongs to Me is also a pretty good novel about the time.

Also a film (1950s?), and 1970s tv series based on it.
 
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Being born in the 1960s and having had grandparents who were adults at the time, and remembering their reminiscences, I love looking at/reading about this period.

As time goes on, I've come to think that our 1960s/70s childhoods had, despite the welfare state and the spread of consumerism into the working class and all that, much more in common with the pre-WW2 period than the times we live in now. Although I realise that this is a matter of debate. But I seem to remember playing amidst the debris of what were still WW2 bomb sites (or possibly slum clearance debris) in the late '60s. The communal bath houses (one at the end of our street near city centre Manchester when I was a little kid) and our mothers going to do the family clothes wash at the 'wash house' down the road. No indoor bathroom or toilet. Coal fires...
 
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JimW said:
Love on the Dole bit of a classic.
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I love The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. This will be right up my street.

Some digging around led me to When the Boat Comes In. I'm a 1980's kid, never watched it. Is it any good?
 
RedRedRose said:
I love The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. This will be right up my street.

Some digging around led me to When the Boat Comes In. I'm a 1980's kid, never watched it. Is it any good?
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When the Boat Comes In is excellent, final season may be a little weaker, but well worth watching
 
Puddy_Tat said:
If municipal socialists are of interest, Fenner Brockway's 'Bermondsey Story, the life of Alfred Salter' and 'Ada Salter: Pioneer of Ethical Socialism', by Graham Taylor (not, I assume, the footballing one) may be of interest - they were active in the liberal party, then Independent Labour Party, then Labour Party before, during and after the 1914 War.

They were both Bermondsey (and from memory, LCC councillors), he was MP as well. She was London's first woman mayor, and the first labour woman mayor in the country.

May be a case of trying to see if library has them - the former seems to be going for a bloody silly price, which I certainly didn't pay, and the latter seems to be confused in some catalogues with a book about border collies (I got the border collies book from somewhere that's not amazon when i tried to buy it and sent it back... did get a copy second hand somewhere else which i haven't got round to reading yet.)

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Fenner Brockway's daughter was my Woodcraft Folk leader. Of course i didn't know what that meant at the time...
 
another two on the bookshelf -

"the children can't wait", edited jess steele - about the mcmillan sisters and their work in what would now be called 'early years' child welfare and education in deptford (the story starts before the 1914 war)

"poplarism, 1919-25, george lansbury and the councillors' revolt", noreen branson - about the poplar borough council and their arguments with central government about fair distribution of funding (which ended up with the occasional council meeting taking place in brixton nick when the councillors wouldn't do what they were told)

i'm trying to decide which biog of george lansbury to get to go with the latter
 
RedRedRose said:
More on George Lansbury would be much appreciated puddy_tat. He's a very interesting figure.
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i got a copy of 'Good Old George: The Life of George Lansbury' by Bob Holman (second-paw copies on e-bay for 3 - 4 quid) and am part way through reading it.

Serge Forward said:
His granddaughter was in Bedknobs and Broomsticks and Murder She Wrote.
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and a grandson was oliver postgate, one of the creators of ivor the engine, bagpuss, the clangers and so on (OP was a conscientious objector in the 1939 war, and later an anti-nuclear campaigner. there were one or two mildly subversive bits in the smallfilms animations - ivor and jones the steam's action in hiding a fox from the local hunt probably counts as sabbing, although i didn't quite grasp this when i was a kitten.)

minnie lansbury was GL's daughter-in-law (angela lansbury was daughter of minnie's husband and his second wife) - she was a suffragette and poplar councillor (who also ended up in the nick as a result of their action on rates, and died quite young, from pneumonia, possibly as a result of being inside) - there is a book on her life which seems to be out of print and bloody expensive unless you do the e-book thing (suggestion it's being re-printed.)
 
Puddy_Tat said:
i got a copy of 'Good Old George: The Life of George Lansbury' by Bob Holman (second-paw copies on e-bay for 3 - 4 quid) and am part way through reading it.



and a grandson was oliver postgate, one of the creators of ivor the engine, bagpuss, the clangers and so on (OP was a conscientious objector in the 1939 war, and later an anti-nuclear campaigner. there were one or two mildly subversive bits in the smallfilms animations - ivor and jones the steam's action in hiding a fox from the local hunt probably counts as sabbing, although i didn't quite grasp this when i was a kitten.)

minnie lansbury was GL's daughter-in-law (angela lansbury was daughter of minnie's husband and his second wife) - she was a suffragette and poplar councillor (who also ended up in the nick as a result of their action on rates, and died quite young, from pneumonia, possibly as a result of being inside) - there is a book on her life which seems to be out of print and bloody expensive unless you do the e-book thing (suggestion it's being re-printed.)
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wasn't janine booth (who wrote the book about minnie lansbury, not simply a random question) in the awl?

e2a: yes
1653835102074.png

Janine Booth wins in RMT Exec election

AWL member Janine Booth has become the first ever woman to be elected to the London Transport seat on the RMT's national Council of Executives. In a landslide victory, Janine received more than double the amount of votes won by her opponent (2,062 to 947). The key focus of her campaign was...
www.workersliberty.org www.workersliberty.org
 
Piers Brendon's book is great. George Orwell's Coming up for Air and Keep the Aspidistra Flying also really recommended.

Jean Rhys novels esp. Quartet and Sleep it Off Lady are nice guides to boozy demi-monde in late 20s / early 30s Paris.

Noreen Branson's Britain in the Nineteen Twenties is a bit old fashioned now but very solid & accessible intro to the period.
 
Fascism’s Warning Signs

Argues that the pre-conditions for fascism in Britain were laid by a crisis in Conservatism that emerged after WW1. There are some claims about industry and fears of Britain being invaded, which I might need to revisit.

This long-term controversy over economic and imperial strategy had major implications for fascism in Britain because it fostered the interaction between fascists and conservatives. It is often argued that British fascism inevitably failed because it made no appeal to conventional right-wing forces. In fact, the problem lay more in the extent to which conventional conservatism managed to satisfy the concerns that animated fascists or offered a vehicle for their aims. It proved relatively easy for Tory MPs to operate in both fascist and conservative organizations simultaneously during the interwar period.

Some of them frankly characterized fascism as a more virile expression of their party’s creed. All the elements of protectionism—the protection of British jobs, the development of the empire, the exclusion of foreign products, and the attack on the influence of Jews and financiers—carried conviction on the right because they spoke to long-standing grievances.
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Perhaps the most obvious of the preconditions for interwar fascism was the anti-Semitism that was rife throughout British society and across the political spectrum. Its best-known advocates were the writer and MP Hilaire Belloc and his friends Cecil Chesterton and G. K. Chesterton, who used their journals the Eye Witness and My Weekly as vehicles for anti-Semitic propaganda. They fostered the stereotyped view of Jews as “a non-Christian culture, embedded for ages in what has always been a Christian culture, [which] acts as an irritant and to some extent as a parasite, because it trades and schemes but does not plough or produce.”7 They blamed Jews for virtually all historic and recent disasters, including the Boer War and the revolutionary movements in Russia, and condemned them as basically disloyal. Some of the anti-Semites and eugenicists of Edwardian Britain advocated Zionism and even approved the use of the “lethal chamber” to eliminate undesirable elements from society.
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In fact, however, the defining characteristic of the Edwardian era was a crisis of conservatism. Alarmed by the pace of social change and the rise of the labor movement, and frustrated by its own impotence, sections of the Edwardian right began to display a dangerous disillusionment with conventional politics. Not only did Conservatives lose three elections in 1906 and 1910, but the Liberals’ electoral pact with the Labour Party and the Irish Nationalists appeared capable of excluding the Tories from power indefinitely. Quite suddenly, the political agenda had changed.
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A380 said:
Fenner Brockway's daughter was my Woodcraft Folk leader. Of course i didn't know what that meant at the time...
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not knowing anything about this, I googled. Brockway the elder lived to 99.5 and the daughter seems to be still with us at 101.

(I'm reading this thread at all b/c my parents both were in England during those years.)
 
RedRedRose said:


Indeed he did.

It's an excellent song with no shortage of optimism and nodding to the labour movement. However, "they brought prosperity down at the armoury" never really made sense to me in light of Chamberlain and the policy of appeasement.
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The day after Chamberlain came back from Munich, he ordered that rearmament be stepped up.

We've always remembered appeasement as a policy of naiveity (sp?) carried out from a position of weakness, but I'd say it's more like a policy of cynicism carried out from a position of strength.
 
After the Munich agreement, Hitler complained of being duped and being denied an opportunity to go to war. He'd have to wait another year.

For the sake of context, its also important to note the isolationism of America, the instability of France, and some internal barometers of Britain such as the King and Country debate ("This House will under no circumstances fight for its King and country") and the Peace Ballot. We'd been ruled by Ramsay MacDonald, an avowed pacifist and had the depression to deal with. Avoiding war at all costs, probably had more than a few takers.
 
The expensively educated class lost a lot of sons in the great war. There was also a gospel based nonconformist and an internationalist tradition which was pacifistic in the sense of rejecting the preparation for and fighting of modern war. There are some studies of conscientious objection, in Huddersfield, by way of example.

Billy Bragg's Between the Wars was more of an invitation to reflect on the similarities between the grey worlds of poor 30s Britain and poor 80s Britain than anything I think, but you can ask him.
 
I am reading Stuart Maconie at the minute. In 2016, he re-enacted the same march of the Jarrow Crusdade as part of its 80 anniversary. Its part history book, part lament to Northern Britain after Brexit.

image.jpeg

Utterly humbling how these guys tried to salvage their self-respect after falling on hard times. The people of Jarrow were sacrificed to concentrate ship-building in other more profitable yards with the collusion of local magnate Charles Palmer. Then, during the 30's, Jarrow would suffer unemployment rates of up to 70-80%, grinding poverty and some of worst child mortality rates of anywhere in the UK.

After completing their march to London, neither the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, nor the Labour leader Ramsay McDonald would meet them. In fact, with the exception of Ellen Wilkinson, Labour Party support seems to have been absent throughout.


On a lighter note, Alan Price of the Animals fame, wrote a beautiful ode to the march.

 
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