MACMILLAN
For Jackie
Contents
Part One
LIVING IN THE FUTURE
1900–1914
Part Two
THE MEANING OF HELL
1914–1918
Part Three
KEEPING OUR BALANCE
1919–1939
Part Four
THROUGH FIRE, A NEW COUNTRY
1939–1945
Preface
This new book comes both before and after. I wrote it after my History of Modern Britain, which ran from the austerity years at the end of the Second World War to the current time – from Grey to Brown. Here, I describe the near half-century before that. Those forty-five years, short enough, were crammed, almost modern, and tragic. They include the Edwardian age, which was one of the most interesting periods in all British history, both world wars, and the wild roller-coaster ride of the twenties and thirties. This was the time when modern Britain was born. We had been one thing – an empire – and became another – a democracy. At the time few people realized how incompatible the two things are. We moved from living in Britannia, with her king-emperors and grand landed aristocracy, a place where most people could not vote, and found ourselves in Britain, a northern welfare state in the shadow of the United States. On the way, millions of people struggled with the dilemma of how to live a good life. It was a time of new technologies, political uproar and fights about class and sex. It was a time of fools and visionaries and heroes – sometimes, as in the case of Winston Churchill, whose spirit stalks these pages, all of them wrapped up in a single life.
Looking back, we learn to see ourselves more sharply. Our forebears were living on the lip of the future, just as we are. Their illusions about what was to come should make us, right now, a little humble. They were tough, passionate and young, however ancient they seem now. They worried about sleaze, told bad jokes, liked films and fatty foods, and occasionally rose to greatness when tested by terrible times. Inevitably, the two world wars overshadow much of the life around them. In recent years both have been reassessed, quite roughly. For many the Great War was converted from a significant national triumph to an inhuman and pointless disaster. Some say that by paving the way for Lenin, Stalin and Hitler, it was one of the great failures of humankind. The Second World War is now being almost as radically reassessed. Did we really have to fight it? Would Hitler not have softened into a non-genocidal if autocratic leader had Britain done a deal in 1940? Perhaps there would have been no Holocaust, the Empire would have slowly evolved into a federation of democracies and, because the United States would have stayed away, there would have been no Cold War, with its threat of global annihilation, either? Since Britannia’s role in the opening stages of both world conflicts was pivotal, these are clearly huge questions about the role of the British in modern times.
No one can be sure about the lost futures that vanished with paths not taken. But the Kaiser’s German empire was an expansionist military regime, with little real parliamentary safeguard, which was intent on dominating Europe. It offered an alternative version of modernity, a powerful autocratic one, which came very close to triumphing. The future for Europeans would not have been either peaceful or democratic had the German armies broken through in 1914, or in 1918. Certainly, the fate of the colonized around the world would not have been pleasanter. Had Britain succumbed in 1940 to the Nazi offer – keep your empire and we will keep Europe – then there is no evidence that Hitler would have renounced his obsessive desire to sweep Jewry from Europe. Nor is there much evidence that he would have kept his word. He would have been in a better position to defeat Stalin, it is true; yet a longer, even bloodier conflict would surely have followed, since a total German invasion of European and Asian Russia seems impossible. Atomic weaponary would have become real inside Germany, at least as quickly (probably more quickly) as it did at Los Alamos.
And the British? Linked to a fading imperial past but without the markets or industry to sustain or protect the old glory, we would have crumbled into a vassal state, one act of appeasement followed by another, as Churchill predicted. There would have been no Atlantic alliance and America would have gone her own way, probably forced to accept a world divided into zones of influence – Nazi, Russian, Japanese and so on. For all the horrors of the past century, this does not seem an appetizing alternative. So, for this writer, the wars for the protection of democracy were real conflicts, which could not have been side-stepped and which, once begun, had to be won.
My last book described what I called with only some journalistic flippancy the defeat of politics by shopping. That is, the ideologies were trounced by consumerist materialism. It takes a lot of politics, of course, to set up and maintain a market-dominated and market-mimicking way of life. It was not inevitable; there were other roads not taken. This book describes what happened before the triumph of the market, or ‘shopping’, when it seemed the world would be shaped by politics. It was no paradise. If these were the decades when modern Britain was born, it was a bloody and painful birth. The people whose blood was spilt and who experienced the pain looked different from us, smelt different and thought differently. But in the majority of cases they were our close relatives. Their idealism, their mistakes, even their hobbies and entertainments, have plenty to teach us still.
Like the previous book, this one accompanies a BBC2 television series. In both cases, I wrote the book first, relying on my own research – and so the mistakes really are mine. Then, working with friends and colleagues, we reshaped the material to form the documentaries. The films and the book are not the same, however. There are many stories, judgements and characters in these pages that do not appear on screen; and there are a few points covered in the TV series that are not described here, usually because they were highlighted by one of the directors or researchers. But this was written as a book, not as something to accompany something else. My only guiding principle is that I have kept in what is most important, and what interested me most. The last few years have been grim ones for patriotic people in Britain, when our politics have seemed embarrassing and we have almost drowned in a dirty puddle of mutual recrimination. The past was not so totally different; what we need most is perspective. My dream is that by returning to our not-so-distant history, I might remind readers why, with all its faults, this is a lucky place to be living in, and one we can be quietly proud of.
Andrew Marr
June 2009