5
Economic Blizzard 1929–37
BRICKS AND MORTAR
A good investment was often said by the British to be ‘as safe as houses’. House ownership had become socially widespread by the end of the nineteenth century, with working-class landlords as well as tenants. But the national figure for owner-occupiers was not very high before the First World War, only about 10 per cent of all dwellings. In an era when prices were fairly steady in the long term, it was not rational to acquire a house simply as a hedge against inflation. People of all social classes were content to rent their houses. Even the aristocracy, with their vast landed estates, might rent town houses for the season. Professional families did not see owning their own homes as a necessary part of keeping up appearances. Working-class families, especially in big cities, got used to ‘flitting’ between rented accommodation, whether to seek work, or slightly more adequate space, or cheaper rents. Conversely, home ownership was spread patchily over the country. Miners, like agricultural workers, characteristically lived in tied cottages made available by their employers; but textile workers in Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire often bought their houses. If a two-up, two-down terrace house in Oldham might go for as little as £150, that represented a year’s wages for a top-rate cotton spinner.
Mortgages had originally been developed by cash-strapped members of the landed interest as a means of raising funds on the security of the real property which they already owned. By the end of the Victorian era this device had been inverted, both financially and socially, so that funds could be advanced to prospective house-purchasers, who then paid off mortgages on the homes which they occupied. Instead of allowing improvident aristocrats to turn fixed capital into ready money, mortgages thus became the means by which thrifty artisans turned their own rent payments into capital. Some Victorian building societies were like cooperatives or friendly societies, run by their own members, bent on self-help through pooling their resources; and disbanding once they all had their own hornes. What ‘permanent’ building societies did was to institutionalize this function, taking on new generations of members, not only as borrowers but as savers, earning a modest but steady return ultimately secured by a good portfolio of residential property, with interest paid net of income tax through mutually advantageous arrangements with the Inland Revenue.
One way or another, the British put a lot of money into bricks and mortar. Around the turn of the century, buildings and works accounted for upwards of half of all the new capital created annually. Though this proportion declined slightly in the Edwardian period, after the war it again stood at over half, and within this total it becomes possible to distinguish dwellings. In the 1920s houses represented about one-quarter of the country’s annual fixed-capital formation, and by the mid-1930s over one-third. This tells us what people were prepared to invest; what did they get for their money? Housebuilding enjoyed a great boom around the turn of the century – I million new houses in seven years – though falling back to little more than 50,000 a year just before the war, which brought a savage cutback in construction. By the late 1920s, however, a rate of 200,000 a year was normal.
The big changes came after the First World War, when the aspiration for home ownership increasingly became a middle-class norm. More than one in three of the new houses built between the wars and, by 1939, well over a quarter of all dwellings, of whatever age, were owner-occupied: a figure that did not change substantially over the next twenty years. Building societies adjusted to the pressure of demand by becoming more user-friendly, extending the normal term of a mortgage to twenty years and making it easier for customers to put down small deposits on suitable properties – usually newly built houses which satisfied current building regulations. Suburban housing developments were now targeted firmly at mass owner-occupation rather than renting. Those who could afford to buy were thus encouraged to move out of older properties in town centres, which inevitably tended to move downmarket and were increasingly seen as the visible sign of the housing problem, to be solved by slum clearance. For half a century, until the tide of conservation turned, some fine urban domestic architecture from earlier centuries was at risk from philanthropic demolitionists.
Housing became a hot political issue after the First World War, which intensified the housing shortage by enforcing cuts on the supply-side while the pent-up demand for decent accommodation soared. The Lloyd George coalition was remembered for its promise of ‘homes fit for heroes’ – bitterly remembered, as it turned out. The sensitivity of housebuilding to changes in interest rates was accentuated by the post-war growth of owner-occupation. The rise in bank rate to 7 per cent in 1920–21 spelt the doom of the post-war housing programme; and the dear money of the 1920s continued to inhibit building. Nonetheless the state was now in the housing business. The Conservatives preferred to offer subsidies to private enterprise, trusting that the benefits would trickle down to the needy once the market was stimulated; about 400,000 houses were built in the 1920s under legislation which Neville Chamberlain introduced. Labour directed subsidy towards municipal provision for rent to the working class, and in ten years the Wheatley Housing Act of 1924 produced over half a million ‘council houses’, often on large green-field estates on the outskirts of towns. By 1939 10 per cent of households were council tenants. The total capital expenditure of local authorities, which had generally been between £20 and £30 million a year before the war, now usually exceeded £100 million. The main difference was housing, which accounted for more than one-third of this total (more than half in Scotland).
For county councils, the other major item in the capital budget was roads. Local-authority investment in highways and bridges had been around £2 million a year before the war; in the late 1920s it was nudging £10 million. The reason is obvious. In 1913 the number of private cars for the first time exceeded 100,000; in 1922 it exceeded 300,000 and in 1930 1 million, with more than another million licences held for motorcycles and goods vehicles. Motor-vehicle duties produced £7 million a year for the Exchequer in 1921, five times as much by 1939. Notionally these revenues went into the Road Fund (established by Lloyd George in 1909) at least until Churchill raided it to balance his budget in 1927; but the county councils, who were actually responsible for roads, had no claim to the money beyond what they could negotiate in Treasury grants.
The impact of the internal combustion engine was felt in many ways. The slogan ‘Safety First’ was used in campaigns to cut the rising toll of road accidents, and establishing liability gave new prominence to the law of tort. Increasing numbers of drivers were convicted of motoring offences – nearly half a million a year by 1938, 60 per cent of all convictions. In an era when criminal statistics had fallen to a historic low, this was a major social change. Previously the police had spent much of their time in petty harassment of the working classes on the streets for moral lapses – sex, drink and gambling – which generally went unpunished when money bought privacy and discretion. With their new motor cars, the middle classes for the first time found themselves systematically on the wrong side of the law.
In 1920 the new Ministry of Transport started classifying roads and numbering the main routes, like spokes in a wheel with London as the hub. The Great North Road to Edinburgh became the A1, the Old Kent Road to Dover the A2, and so on. This looked fine on the new maps produced for motorists. The trouble was that many of these ‘first-class’ roads were second-rate. They straggled through villages which resented the intrusion of motor traffic; ancient bridges and town centres inevitably created bottlenecks. G. K. Chesterton might celebrate the fancy that ‘the rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road’ but it left something to be desired when seen as part of the infrastructure of a modern industrial nation.
The German response, under Hitler, was the creation of the autobahn network; in the USA the public works of the New Deal were to be distinguished by the engineering of great modern bridges. Such plans proved too grandiose for the British. The politicians who urged them, notably Lloyd George for the Liberals and Oswald Mosley for Labour, were themselves rather suspect for their Napoleonic ambitions, which irked solid citizens who had no desire to be dictated to. Likewise civil servants tended to dismiss the supporting arguments from Keynes as too clever by half.
What Keynes was saying in 1929–30 was not actually so different from other economists, though he said it louder and more insistently. The point was that the economy was out of balance (disequilibrium), as shown by the fact that 1 million workers were unemployed. The reason for this must have been that British costs were uncompetitive; and, failing other means of getting them down, that meant that wages were too high. Virtually all economists would have agreed with this analysis; where they disagreed was over the remedy. A few said that wage cuts were therefore the only solution. Most, however, agreed with Keynes in saying that reductions in labour costs would indeed be a solution if they were readily forthcoming, but that in the real world wages had failed to adjust fully to the parity of sterling imposed by the gold standard, and therefore other expedients had to be found.
Everyone could see that wages were ‘sticky’ – they would not adjust. But sterling was also sticky – it could not adjust. So the British economy was trapped between these two unadjustable prices. Since something had to give, unemployment rose. This is what Keynes told the Macmillan Committee on Finance and Industry, which the Labour Government set up in 1929, and essentially it is what he wrote in his book Treatise on Money (1930). He looked for a remedy which accepted the gold standard as a political fait accompli, which accepted the current wage level as an economic fact of life, and instead sought to stimulate the domestic economy so as to create employment. Keynes’s own preference was public investment, which was something the Government could control. This would have several objectives, of which the most immediate was to give jobs through public-works projects. But the broader aim was to mobilize savings which currently were not finding their way into real productive investment (‘bricks and mortar’) and thus kick-start the economy by making up for this shortfall.1 Furthermore, he urged, whether or not the other objectives were fully achieved, such schemes would leave Britain with a modernized infrastructure in the form of roads and bridges.
Historians at one time supposed that a Keynesian programme of this kind was bound to do the trick and portrayed its opponents in a poor light; but nowadays the poor light is more often reserved for Keynes, who has been accused of facile over-optimism. To be sure, able civil servants, like Sir Richard Hopkins of the Treasury, approached the problem not by simply reiterating the dogmatic ‘Treasury view’ of 1929 but with a hard-won administrative experience from which Keynes had something to learn (as he came to see). It is true, moreover, that even a public-works programme on the scale he advocated would have had a limited impact on unemployment. But in 1929, it should be remembered, with 1 million out of work, the aspiration was also limited. Maybe this total could not have been cut by 600,000, as Lloyd George pledged; but the Labour Government’s own programme, which was half as big, seems to have got halfway there, according to modern estimates. In the two years to the summer of 1931 public-works schemes costing more than £100 million were brought into operation. The real tragedy was that the scale of the unemployment problem had by then escalated owing to the world slump.
Failing a British New Deal, road-building proceeded by traditional methods, though on an increased scale. A national responsibility for ‘trunk roads’ was assumed in 1936, a step towards the idea of an integrated transport network. At the bottom of the slump, moreover, local authorities were investing nearly twice as much in highways and bridges as in the 1920s. Furthermore, their budget for housebuilding was also maintained. To some extent, then, the construction industry could look to public investment to tide it through lean times. But its real salvation, in the absence of major public works, came through private, market-led demand for bricks and mortar.
Housebuilding did not drop below 200,000 even in the worst year (1930) and it averaged 360,000 a year in the years 1934–8. Naturally the new houses were built in places where people wanted to live and where they could afford to pay for them. The high-wage regions of Greater London and Greater Birmingham saw a disproportionate growth – or rather saw an adaptation of these conurbations to the new economic and demographic pattern of the mid twentieth century, leaving the old industrial North behind. Though ‘ribbon development’ along the main roads out of towns was to provide an object lesson in the need for planning to prevent erosion of the countryside, suburban development was not wholly unplanned. There was a major investment in the infrastructure of Greater London. The Metropolitan Railway came up with the concept of ‘Metroland’, promoting suburban development in London’s north-west suburbs. And the purposeful extension of the Underground rail network left its mark, not least through the influence of its commercial manger, Frank Pick, who came to exercise enormous patronage in sponsoring clean, spare modern design in everything from posters to new stations for London Transport (including its well-known circularlogo).
It was this new England of sprawling suburbia – in contradistinction to the two old Englands of declining industrial North and historic rural South – which the novelist J. B. Priestley spied, with mixed feelings, in his English Journey (1933). At its best, it showed a new consciousness of the importance of modern design in urban and commercial settings. The burgeoning ‘picture palaces’ of the period did not generally evoke the rococo extravagance of traditional theatre-building, all gilt and red plush; instead massive modern structures, loosely derivative from ancient Egyptian models, were brought to a hundred high-street Luxors or Odeons, all showing the same film. The functional elegance of the international style, derived from the Bauhaus, also left a distinctive mark, even if it was only the use of steel-framed windows, with the gimmick of turning them around corners. It was the Americanization of the chromium-plated suburbs, spawned around London, which struck George Orwell, leaving him not only cold but nostalgically musing about green fields in his novel Coming Up for Air (1938). The Hoover factory on the A40 out of west London shows what he meant: it fitly represents the industrial archaeology of the period (1932–8), set amid residential development which was home alike to some of its affluent workers and to the customers for the consumer durables, from electric irons to vacuum cleaners, which it supplied.
New housing estates, especially council houses, were often built to a uniform plan, exploiting economies of scale both in design and in mass production. While well-known architects scrambled for prestige commissions, it was David Adam, on the staff of the building firm Laings, who designed more actual houses than any of the big names. ‘Stockbroker’s Tudor’ became a term of art at the top of the market for a rustic idiom which was derived from the garden suburbs of the early part of the century. But it was susceptible of infinite and ingenious adaptation, to suit every pocket. The suburbs of the 1930s offered solid family homes with gardens and usually space for garages. The semidetached house symbolized the bargain that was being struck between genteel aspirations and cost-effective accommodation. There was more good basic design in such houses than Osbert Lancaster’s telling satires on ‘bypass variegated’ might suggest; in the late twentieth century it was thirty-year-old tower blocks not sixty-year-old semis which were unloved by those who had to live in them. For many workers in employment the dream of home ownership came true, because of a combination of developments. Smaller families were a factor; so were higher real incomes; but what tipped the balance was the reduced cost of a mortgage in the 1930s, which was transformed into an era of cheap money. This only happened after Britain had been forced off the gold standard.
CRISIS
The fate of the second Labour Government was bound up, to a degree unprecedented in British history, with the performance of the economy. In 1929, when Labour came in, high unemployment was already the key issue. At that time, it could be blamed on the capitalist system; but since the Government had neither a plan for socialist transformation nor a parliamentary majority, such talk served largely as an alibi for inaction. Or it could be blamed on Free Trade; this many Conservatives did privately, though publicly they were temporarily inhibited by having to defend Churchill’s (Free Trade) record at the Treasury. Or it could be blamed on the return to the gold standard; but reversing the painful decision of 1925 was not advocated even by its arch-critic Keynes, who instead set about devising expedients for managing the consequences. Or, finally, unemployment could be blamed on the economy’s senescent rigidities; but the problems of wage stickiness, and of structural unemployment in old industries that were now past it, were easier to identify than to remedy.
One way or another, the weakness of the UK’s competitive position stood out. After all, world trade was buoyant; the USA was forging ahead. The Wall Street crash in the autumn of 1929, however, suddenly ended the American boom and a cumulative contraction in world trade took hold in 1930. MacDonald called it an ‘economic blizzard’.
It meant that economic depression was no longer a peculiar British problem but part of a world problem, bringing cyclical unemployment on top of pre-existing structural unemployment. This made it more difficult to find a solution along orthodox lines, by improving competitiveness, since even if British exports somehow managed to cut costs, their foreign markets were now impoverished. Previously it had been domestic supply which was inelastic, unable to stretch to meet the prices which overseas customers were prepared to pay. Now international demand became inelastic, unlikely to expand much whatever price reduction was made. The assumptions of Free Trade, underpinned by the self-adjusting mechanisms of the gold standard, suddenly looked vulnerable. Before the war, the necessary adjustments had generally been easy for Britain; since 1925 they had proved hard to make; by 1930 they were beginning to look impossible.
But though an orthodox policy now looked fallible, the economic blizzard simultaneously made it more difficult to tackle unemployment with an unorthodox policy – or at least one which ignored the international dimension. Bad times naturally depressed tax revenues while increasing government commitments through the dole. Worries about the budget deficit, and even about the pound sterling itself, highlighted the importance of confidence. The City’s reflexes were all for belt-tightening – usually other people’s belts – not for a further increase in public expenditure. In hard times, where was the money to be found? Saying that it would all be financed by loans only made matters worse; and, whatever the rationality of these fears, such a lack of confidence could prejudice the Government’s credit if it were to seek a sum like £200 million for road-building. A run on the pound was seen as the horror of horrors. Moreover, public works might have measured up to the challenge of unemployment in 1929, when its level stood at around around 7 per cent; but in 1931 and 1932 it averaged over 15 per cent.
These statistics indicate a major recession, with unemployment rising in all parts of the country, not just in the old industrial black spots. But the problem looked even more frightening to contemporaries because the ‘headline’ figures for unemployment, now regularly published in the newspapers, covered only insured workers, who were in occupations particularly susceptible to cyclical fluctuation. The public had got used to unemployment figures of 10 per cent in the late 1920s: a bit more each winter, a bit less each summer. In 1930 the monthly average exceeded 16 per cent, rising to over 20 per cent for the next three years running. These figures inevitably generated concern – not only about the plight of the unemployed but about the cost of maintaining them.
‘Work or maintenance’ was Labour’s slogan, going back to the Right-to-Work bills of the early part of the century. In practice the emphasis fell on the second, reflecting the fact that Labour’s constituency in industrial Britain was immediately at risk, whether or not government proved able to master the underlying economic forces. The assumptions which the 1920 Insurance Act made about average unemployment had long since been invalidated, yet the continued payment of the ‘dole’, which successive Governments extended piecemeal to groups of unemployed workers who had exhausted their entitlement to benefit, showed the political popularity of the insurance principle – or rather the popular revulsion against falling back on the Poor Law. In an effort to shore up the system in 1927, the Conservatives had accepted the proposals of an all-party inquiry (the Blanesburgh Report) aimed at putting the payment of benefit on a sound financial basis by introducing more realistic actuarial assumptions. Meanwhile, purely as a transitional measure, until prosperity returned, the dole would again be extended. In hindsight, this stored up double trouble, since the unanticipated failure of the upturn, followed by an intensified downturn, mocked the notion that the scheme could now balance its books; while ‘transitional’ benefit further institutionalized the dole.
This was the bad situation which the Labour Government inherited. It acted quickly – to make things worse, at any rate for the National Insurance fund. The borrowing limits on the scheme, under pressure from the numbers of long-term unemployed on the dole, were progressively relaxed, as were the conditions under which it could be claimed. No longer did the onus of proof rest on claimants to establish that they were ‘genuinely seeking work’ (as well as being registered at the labour exchange). These changes undoubtedly had some effect in pushing up the unemployment statistics, which showed increases from 1.5 million in January 1930 to over 2 million by July and 2.5 million by the end of the year. To infer that they also pushed up unemployment, by removing an incentive to find work, is another matter. It is equally plausible to infer that authentic claimants, who had previously been cheated of relief by arbitrary tests, now got their due. There is no reason to suppose that large numbers of people started living off the state as a preferred way of life, though there is evidence that clients maximized the support they could obtain from the competing agencies of National Insurance and new public assistance committees (which had taken over responsibility for the residual unemployed when the Poor Law was wound up in 1929). The truth is that, whatever the administrative flaws in the system, or the marginal disincentives it created, the shocking increase in the number of men who were on the dole was driven by the slump itself.1
The workshop of the world, built on Free Trade, had fallen on hard times. In this context, it was little wonder that protectionist ideas resurfaced. Lord Beaverbrook seized his chance to relaunch Imperial Preference. Since talk of Tariff Reform had always upset the electors, the great newspaperman now started talking of Empire Free Trade instead. The Daily Express was joined by Lord Rothermere’s Daily Mail in this initiative, masquerading for a time as the United Empire Party, but really the hobby horse of two press barons. Baldwin saw that there was a protectionist wind blowing in the Conservative Party, and was increasingly free to trim his sails once his restive colleague Churchill had virtually jumped ship. So Baldwin made concessions on policy, talking of safeguarding industry and putting food taxes to a referendum, but stood his ground in asserting his own leadership. Indeed he turned the tables on Beaverbrook and Rothermere by making their presumptuous demands the issue in rallying his party’s support. The by-election at St George’s Westminster in March 1931, when a dissident Conservative candidate was put up, allowed Baldwin to administer the coup de grâce. Borrowing a phrase from his cousin Kipling, he denounced the press lords for aiming at ‘power without responsibility – the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages’.
Shakily supported by the Liberals, the Government remained firm at least in its commitment to Free Trade. Philip Snowden, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, was as firm in the faith as his predecessor Churchill – firmer as it turned out. Snowden gave the axioms of financial rectitude the stiffening of an inflexible Nonconformist conscience; he was determined to vindicate Labour’s reputation for financial responsibility; his worry was what to do about the gaping budget deficit created by the dole. J. H. Thomas, as Lord Privy Seal, presided with initial bravado over a ministerial committee charged with tackling unemployment. Its fitful activities had the effect on its junior member, Mosley, of demonstrating that the old men and the old methods would get nothing done.
The veteran socialist George Lansbury had free-spending instincts, as his involvement in Poplarism had showed; as Commissioner of Works, he and the Scottish Secretary, Thomas Johnston, sided with Mosley against Thomas, in the committee. The argument came to a head during 1930. Mosley was a dashing figure whose impatience to tackle unemployment induced him to advocate a revolution in the structure of government. When a plan for a new bypass around a town was formulated it had to endure a cautious Treasury appraisal of its cost-effectiveness and an endless series of negotations with the several local authorities who would be responsible for surveying the route, acquiring the land and building the road itself. Mosley wanted to create his own bypass – around the Whitehall traffic jam. He produced a memorandum for the cabinet, proposing a dirigiste economic strategy which rode roughshod over the austere traditions upheld by the British Treasury. The Mosley memorandum proposed cutting the workforce by raising the school-leaving age and reducing the retirement age; then using easier credit to stimulate the economy behind a tariff wall, with special arrangements for imperial trade.
Mosley’s response to its rejection was his resignation from the Government in May 1930 and his subsequent campaign to rally sufficient support in the Labour Party to impose his views. At the party conference in October he came close to winning the vote, but already the support he received for his proposals was being compromised by suspicion of his domineering personality. A manifesto he published in December 1930 drew minority Labour support (as well as some covert sympathy from others like Keynes and Harold Macmillan) but the New Party which he went on to launch was seen by his respectable supporters as a false step – and Mosley’s subsequent lurch into fascism as a reprehensible one. With a brilliant parliamentary career in ruins, he took to the streets (some said the gutter).
Whereas, ever since Lloyd George’s pledge to conquer unemployment in March 1929, the argument had been mainly about public works, after Mosley’s resignation the argument was mainly about tariffs. As prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald had created the Economic Advisory Council to offer expert advice; and its committee of economists, with Keynes as chairman, produced a report in the autumn of 1930 which endorsed a series of expedients, of which tariffs proved much more controversial than public works. Such policies were tainted by the support of Mosley and Beaverbrook. Though MacDonald himself brooded on the alternatives, he knew that any change of course would involve the loss of his Chancellor, a pillar of Free Trade. Still, the march of protectionist ideas in 1930–31 made more headway than in the whole of the previous quarter-century. It was the unlikely sources from which they now gained support that was significant. This was not just the familiar song from the industrialist lobby but a swelling chorus from the City of London, academic economists, trade unionists, even partisan Liberals who had now lost faith in the old cries of Free Trade.
The Government stumbled on. It paid some of its debts to its supporters, for example the Coal Mines Act of 1930 which traded shorter hours to please the miners against cartelization to help the owners. The Agricultural Marketing Act of 1931 could also be seen as loosely corporatist; it was the work of Christopher Addison, ex-supporter of Lloyd George and ex-scapegoat, and it set up marketing boards with price-fixing powers. Herbert Morrison, Labour’s party boss in London, made his mark as Minister of Transport by bringing in proposals for setting up London Transport as a public corporation to take over the capital’s bus, tram and tube operations. The fact that the measure was actually enacted by the successor National Government in 1933 suggests its lack of pronounced ideological content but is equally a tribute to its administrative rationale.
What the Government lacked was a strategy. Spurning that offered by Mosley, it then started talking to Lloyd George, who was likewise never stumped for ideas. At best this offered the promise of support from the Liberals for an agreed programme. The talk now was of tackling unemployment, not conquering it. The real trouble was that by the autumn of 1930 Lloyd George was unable to deliver solid support even if policy agreement proved possible. Sir John Simon, a survivor of Asquith’s cabinet, had never been happy with either the leadership of Lloyd George or an accommodation with Labour; now he rejected both, making it clear that he and his group of Liberal MPs could not be counted on. What Lloyd George got from the Government was the introduction of an Electoral Reform bill, providing for the alternative vote, which would have helped shore up the Liberals’ parliamentary representation to some extent. This was a sufficent inducement to keep most Liberal MPs in line for most of the time until the summer of 1931, when the bill was eviscerated by the House of Lords.
In February 1931, however, there were parliamentary ructions, with more serious implications in train. Faced with Conservative attacks on its wasteful expenditure – the dole again – the Government accepted a Liberal amendment setting up a committee to report on economies. It was the Geddes Axe all over again. Snowden, exasperated by his own backbenchers, hoped that this would protect his back; in fact it opened his flank. For the committee, under Sir George May of the Prudential Assurance Company, took a stern auditor’s view of its responsibilities. It opened the government’s books, briskly insisting that they should balance, just like any responsible firm. One liability which ought to be met out of income, most of the auditors agreed, was the annual provision for the sinking fund, which paid off the national debt. Modern statistics show that revenue still covered government expenditure, as it had in every year since 1921. But this is with hindsight, and without allowing for a sinking-fund transfer, which modern conventions would treat as a residual balancing item, not a binding commitment. Even by the standards of the time, especially by classing all expenditure on unemployment relief as a charge on income, the bottom-line figure the May Committee came up with was exaggerated: a prospective budget deficit of no less than £120 million.
This was the shock-horror figure flashed around the world when the May Report was published on 31 July 1931. It came at a delicate moment; for two months banks had been crashing all over Europe; Germany stood on the brink of financial collapse; the May Report immediately imported the crisis to London. It demanded total cuts of £96 million, two-thirds to come from unemployment benefit. In a series of meetings during August, a majority in the Labour cabinet reluctantly agreed to cuts, though not on this draconian scale. MacDonald and Snowden, who had been empowered to talk to the leaders of the Opposition parties, briefed them all too fully: not just about the total agreed so far but about the further target at which they aimed. This ruled out compromise on any lower figure; yet consent to a higher figure was not forthcoming from the cabinet.
Here was a major political crisis; now it interlocked with a financial crisis that forced the pace. The pound was under strain; the Bank of England needed a loan from New York; its agent J. P. Morgan reported that the conditions would be an economy package which satisfied the Opposition parties. Since everything turned on confidence, a Labour Government which did not inspire confidence on Wall Street was not in a strong position. This was a fact of life, not a ‘bankers’ ramp’ (which is how it went down in Labour mythology). It was not a precise figure of economies that mattered, still less one that the bankers specified: it was any total that would, in effect, satisfy the leaders of the Conservative Party. Since they believed in economy and knew the Government’s breaking-point, it was hardly likely that they would let their opponents off a hook of their own devising. The only conspiracy was that bankers’ instincts and Conservatives’ prejudices naturally conspired together.
The real dilemma was MacDonald’s. After a lifetime given to building up the Labour Party, he was not alone in his perplexity over how to build Jerusalem during an economic blizzard. He had never been in thrall to the axioms of sound finance, like Snowden; he had listened to the economists and made the Treasury respond to Keynes; he had explored the alternatives, albeit hesitantly. But in August 1931, what alternative was there to an orthodox emergency programme? The TUC came up with a package at the last moment, influenced by Ernest Bevin, whose scepticism about the gold standard had been tutored through his membership of the Macmillan Committee. The fact is that the Government now had to face the consequences of its policy of drift and this meant the trenchant logic of deflation. The alternative logic; was devaluation, setting a lower parity against gold; this was not seriously considered, any more than it had been in 1925. The cabinet finally split down the middle. Since the economic imperative was clear to MacDonald, he was determined to do the right thing politically: to save the country, to salvage his self-respect and, he liked to think, to preserve Labour’s credentials as a fit party of government.
The upshot was that when MacDonald had to tender the Labour Government’s resignation on 24 August, he accepted the King’s commission to form the National Government instead. The constitutional prerogatives of the King were actively used to promote this outcome, which George V welcomed, but the shots were called by the party leaders. For Labour, MacDonald knew that he could count on Snowden; Thomas and the Lord Chancellor, Sankey, were also in the new cabinet. For the Conservatives, Baldwin’s decision to accept the Lord Presidency rather than insist on the premiership was crucial; and he accepted too that there would be only four Conservatives in the new cabinet of ten. This left two places for the Liberals, who had been led through the crisis by Sir Herbert Samuel, since Lloyd George was out of action with a prostate operation. (He thus missed his last big chance, in just the sort of crisis which had always brought out the best in him; and Churchill too was excluded.)
The initiative had passed to the Conservatives; but they were glad enough of the Government’s National credentials to carry the dreaded economy proposals. Snowden’s budget in September raised taxes; and a linked economy measure proposed a range of cuts in public salaries and 10 per cent off all unemployment benefits (not the 20 per cent of the May Report). True, the unemployed would feel this even more keenly than high-court judges, the lower ranks in the armed forces more than their officers. Indeed when able seamen at the naval base of Invergordon heard on the radio that they faced nominal cuts of up to 25 per cent (as against 7 per cent for admirals) they retaliated by refusing to muster. Again the news flashed round the world – mutiny in the British fleet! There were two main effects. The Government limited all its cuts to 10 per cent. While this was hardly likely to be popular among those affected, it should be remembered that one of the effects of the slump was a fall in the cost of living by 10 per cent since 1929. This may have helped account for subsequent public acquiescence.
The second effect of the Invergordon ‘mutiny’ was to trigger a sterling crisis. The credits from New York and Paris, which the National Government negotiated, were already under pressure; by mid-September they were being eaten up daily in a new run on the pound. At this point the Bank of England finally capitulated to brute facts by abandoning the gold standard. The National Government, which had been formed primarily to save the pound sterling, survived this collapse of its rationale. Instead, the crisis atmosphere seems to have rallied support to a Government which promised to take a grip on the situation. The ground was prepared for an imminent general election – the other eventuality which the formation of a National Government had been supposed to avoid.
On 21 September 1931 Britain left the gold standard. Like the Royal Navy, this had stood as a symbol of British pre-eminence; but no longer could Britannia rule the waves of currency speculation. At a stroke, the historic parity of sterling at $4.86 was no more; by the end of the year it was around $3.40. The consolation was that, once it had found its own level, sterling did not have to be supported by dear money; by June 1932 it was safe to reduce bank rate to 2 per cent. Confidence, moreover, had been restored by abandoning, not maintaining, the gold standard. By accident, the National Government found what the Labour Government had sought in vain: a policy which would allow the British economy to recover.
CHURCH AND STATE
The rhetoric of politics still had a strong flavour of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. Philip Snowden’s career had been founded on his ‘Come-to-Jesus’ style of oratory. In Lloyd George’s case, this was the survival of form rather than substance, long after he had ceased to share the beliefs of the Dissenting preachers of whose art he remained a connoisseur. Churchill, likewise, had no real attachment to doctrinal Christianity: rather, a strong providential sense in his own and his country’s destiny, for which the cadences of common worship were sometimes the right vehicle. The words for which Baldwin was most often remembered – ‘Give peace in our time, O Lord’ – were not just well chosen for the occasion but were the expression of a deeper and increasingly explicit Christian world view, underlying his familiar rural imagery. In opposition from August 1931, the Labour Party had three leaders in quick succession: first Arthur Henderson, who still carried the mien of a Methodist lay preacher; then George Lansbury, a pious Anglican High Churchman; finally Clement Attlee, whose undemonstrative manner (and taciturn agnosticism) gave little clue to the fervent attachment to a Christian Socialist ethic which his favourite brother Tom had been influential in fostering.
All these men, of course, were Victorians, brought up when Mr Gladstone stalked the land. They had all cut their teeth in the politics of a period when the Nonconformist conscience could not lightly be flouted and when Anglican opposition to the Liberals’ Welsh Church Bill gave the language its longest, if most factitious, word (antidisestablish-mentarianism). Even so, such survivals from the religious bedrock of Victorian politics are a warning against exaggerating the speed and extent of secularization in the twentieth century. Throughout the United Kingdom, older people continued to vote in ways that expressed the sectarian loyalties of the era in which they grew up. The religious affiliations of an earlier generation left a long-lasting residue.
Because population increased so fast throughout the nineteenth century, virtually all forms of organized Christianity could pride themselves on their ever-expanding numbers. This may have been statistically naive but it was psychologically important in reassuring the Established Church that theirs was not a losing battle and in encouraging sects which set a high value on proselytization that they were successfully spreading the word. There was, too, a straightforwardly competitive aspect to the numbers game, which had been fuelled by the only official religious census in 1851. This showed that about half the population of churchgoing age actually attended; and that those who did were split, again roughly half and half, between Anglicans and Nonconformists, with a small remnant of Roman Catholics. The shock at the time had been that there were so few attenders and so many Nonconformists – which may simply show that both Christianity and the Establishment were taken for granted. Subsequent statistics are not directly comparable, but figures for Church membership (a more rigorous threshold), calculated as a proportion of the population, give a measure of density from year to year. This is a sort of archaeological trench through time, bisecting the big dig through the strata of 1851, thus tracking the extent of subsequent change.
What is immediately apparent is that organized religion, and particularly the Church of England, held its ground more effectively than the literary evidence about a late-Victorian crisis of faith might suggest. True, the Nonconformists stopped expanding relative to population in the 1880s and their absolute numbers first teetered towards decline in the 1910s. But the number of Easter communicants in the Church of England formed as big a proportion of the (much increased) population at the start of the First World War as it had done at the beginning of Victoria’s reign. Moreover Anglican density, measured as a proportion of the English population aged fifteen years and over, then declined slowly, from its peak of 12 per cent in 1910 to 10 per cent by 1940 and around 7 per cent until the 1960s. The nearest equivalent calculation for the Church of Scotland gives it a density of about 35 per cent in the 1930s, and still over 30 per cent in the 1960s. Putting the figures for the whole of Great Britain together, it is clear that the Nonconformists suffered the biggest and earliest losses; by 1966 they were little more than half as strong as in 1901, whereas it was after 1970 that the established Churches saw their sharpest decline.
In fact the only denomination to gain over the period was the Roman Catholic Church. It is hardly too much to say that during the twentieth century Great Britain lost its historic identity as a Protestant nation. Except in Northern Ireland, the old anti-popish bogeys (such as the flourishing Victorian mythology about convents) began to look like period pieces. Catholic France was no threat but an ally in two world wars against Germany; and when British propaganda told of Belgian nuns being violated by (Protestant) Prussian soldiers, people knew whose side they were supposed to be on. Francophile writers like Hilaire Belloc had already found a public, as in his charming travelogue The Path to Rome (1902), and later went in for some extravagant special pleading on behalf of an embattled reading of English history where, above all, the Reformation was not the Good Thing that generations of children had been taught. G. K. Chesterton, as Belloc’s co-religionist and comrade-in-arms since the Edwardian period, shared much in his outlook: a large and flamboyant man of letters, who confronted the puritan ethic of industrial capitalism with romantic views about the superiority of pubs and peasants. His most memorable fictional creation, Father Brown, brought the insights of the confessional into the world of the whodunit.
If Chesterton and Belloc carried an essentially Edwardian air, there were now young Catholic novelists writing in a wholly different idiom: oblique, ironical, self-consciously modern, understated, flippant, worldly. It was in this guise that Evelyn Waugh made such a splash from the time of his first best-seller, Decline and Fall (1928). From modest origins in the professional classes, he reinvented himself after Oxford, with a conversion to Catholicism which showed him, from the time of A Handful of Dust (1934), championing the small recusant remnant of the English aristocracy who had clung loyally to the old religion since the Reformation. With beguiling deftness he showed their grace and stoicism – rising to fortitude later with Guy Crouchback in the Sword of Honour trilogy (1962) – as they maintained a way of life that was constantly threatened but constantly English too. A year younger than Waugh, Graham Greene, who was converted in 1926, was unavoidably stereotyped for many years as Waugh’s left-wing counterpart. Greene waited longer for recognition as a major novelist, patently embarrassed by the success of his thrillers, or ‘entertainments’, like Stamboul Train (1932). Only with The Power and the Glory (1940) and The Heart of the Matter (1948) was the reading public properly introduced to ‘Greeneland’, with its sweaty torments of good and evil, argued into the night under foreign skies. His Catholicism was more a matter of cerebration than celebration.
Waugh’s novels were literary artifice which deliberately distanced Catholicism from the real social roots of its revival in Britain. On one calculation, its density rose from 6 per cent in 1901 to 9 per cent in 1966; and the figures for attendance at Mass are congruent with this. Moreoever, this growth parallels a rise in the proportion of Catholic marriages from around 4 per cent to a peak of over 10 per cent in England and Wales (10 per cent to 16 per cent in Scotland) though with a subsequent decline in the 1970s and 1980s. The difficulty here is to know exactly what we are counting. Estimates of the Catholic population, given in good faith by parish priests who were under no illusions about the devotional fervour of their flock, were often a function of the demographic impact of Irish immigration, sometimes one or two generations back. Such communities, through much of industrial England and Scotland, held together around the Church as a familiar haven in their adopted land, and propagated their sense of identity through Catholic schools. This was an extreme example of the way religion was imbricated in local subcultures, with their own lifestyles, loyalties – and feuds. In the inter-war period the politics of Liverpool, and to a lesser extent Glasgow, with their acute divisions on ethno-cultural lines, labelled people as Protestants or Catholics in a way that survived only in Belfast later in the century.
Most people used Churches, especially the Church of England, for rites of passage. Infant baptism or christening was common; and only late in the twentieth century did official forms start asking for ‘first’ instead of ‘christian’ names. Though civil marriage before a registrar was possible, it was not, as in much of continental Europe, necessary; the proper legal forms of marriage could take place in a church. In 1901 in England and Wales 85 per cent of marriages were religious; indeed, two-thirds of all marriages were conducted by the Church of England. To opt for a church wedding was to make an aesthetic as much as a doctrinal choice; little wonder that the words of the Anglican rite are among the most familiar in the English language or that they stacked the odds in favour of the Church. Even at the peak of Dissenting influence in 1906, when they claimed the election of no less than 180 MPs, their best since Cromwell, only one in eight marriages took place in the chapels of England and Wales. Moreover, here the Church retained its historic national role, solemnizing one in two marriages that took place in England into the 1950s, and still one in three in the 1980s. In Scotland, likewise, one in two of all marriages were still conducted by the Church of Scotland in 1960, as against one in four in civil ceremonies; at the beginning of the century as few as one in twenty marriages had been non-religious.1
The position of the established Churches, each with a different theology north and south of the border but each attended impartially by the sovereign, was not quite so anachronistic as it looked at first sight. At a low-pressure level it was accepted more placidly than in the Victorian period when insurgent Dissenters had hugged more keenly felt grievances. To many people the Church of England was a familiar, hierarchical and periodically useful national institution, like the Army; and in the Army recruits who expressed no other religious affiliation were routinely entered as ‘C. of E.’. Great set-piece debates about Church and State, such as the Victorians relished, were rare after the First World War. True, the revision of the Prayer Book created a fuss in 1927–8. The revised Prayer Book simply brought it into line with the much higher level of ritual which many parishes now followed; it was permissive not mandatory; it would have legalized the Anglo-Catholics, with their newfangled smells and bells. This was too much for some of the evangelical Rip Van Winkles in parliament, which twice over rejected the revisions. Whereupon the Revised Prayer Book was published regardless and brought into use without statutory authority.
That there were some limits to what could be condoned was shown by the abdication crisis in 1936. George V died in January 1936, having celebrated his silver jubilee the previous year; not much of a speaker, he had nonetheless projected his gruff persona into millions of homes by broadcasting a Christmas message annually from 1932. King Edward VIII was quite a change from his dutiful father. He was a bachelor of forty-one, popular as the Prince of Wales, not least with a string of girlfriends from the smart set in which he moved. The plot could have been adapted from Waugh – all fast cars, expensive cocktails, brittle repartee, casual adultery, none of it to be taken too seriously. The trouble was that Edward’s latest mistress, Wallis Simpson, proved difficult to ignore: not only was she the King’s constant companion, she was American, she already had one divorce behind her, she was awaiting a second, and once the decree nisi came through, the King told the prime minister, Baldwin, that he wanted to marry her.
Through all this, it should be noted, the British media observed a complete news blackout: no compromising pictures from the King’s Mediterranean yacht, no gossip or speculation, nothing even on the significance of the Simpson divorce hearing. This pregnant silence was broken in December 1936 by the Bishop of Bradford, who simply said that the King needed God’s grace in his calling. The bishop had not even meant to cast the first stone; but it triggered the avalanche. Was this fitting conduct in a King? Most respectable people thought not; the King’s cause was taken up by unreliable figures like Beaverbrook, Rothermere, Churchill, Mosley. Baldwin managed the whole thing neatly, insisting that if the King would not back off he must accept ministerial advice to abdicate; and Attlee agreed. Within days of the affair becoming public, Edward VIII had gone, and his brother had become King George VI.
How could the Supreme Head of the Church of England marry a divorcee when it was forbidden to its ordinary members? This was an issue which the Established Church was spared through Baldwin’s speedy resolution of the crisis, and just as well. Its precept was still that of the marriage service: ‘Those whom God hath joined together, let no man put asunder.’ Although civil divorce had been instituted in the nineteenth century, there were in those days only a few hundred decrees annually. Not only did this represent, in effect, one law for the rich, since the process was prohibitively expensive, but also one law for husbands, another for wives, whose adultery was regarded more opprobriously. Since adultery remained the only offence for which a divorce action could normally be brought, it had first to be committed, or evidence to that effect manufactured, if a married couple decided to part. Hence the element of subterfuge – classically in Brighton hotel bedrooms – which was highlighted after the First World War by the growing number of divorce cases each year – up to nearly 5,000 by the mid-1930s. The 1937 Divorce Act made the law more honest and straightforward, notably by allowing desertion as an alternative ground.
It was, however, the Second World War which brought the significant change. In itself it disrupted marriages, separating wives from husbands who were in the forces, especially those serving overseas. The war also provoked concern to sort out those matrimonial difficulties likely to impair military effectiveness, which opened the way to legal aid, and thus made divorce courts genuinely accessible in the post-war period. There was a demobilization bulge of divorces as well as of births in 1947–8, when over 100,000 divorces went through – more in two years than in the whole period from 1900 to 1939. But the temporary effects of the war, and an easing of the law, can only explain so much; for deeper social changes were subsequently to have an accelerating effect on divorce rates.
The bishops of the Church of England (or rather a selection of them) continued to sit in the House of Lords and to draw stipends which enabled them to rub shoulders with the remnant of the landed interest. Only in the era of life peers (introduced in 1958) were the bishops dragged downmarket – sharing the fate of their clergy, once a gentleman’s profession but in the mid twentieth century a shabby-genteel form of social work. Just as the post-war Conservative Party sought to generalize its Christian appeal in an ecumenical way, so the old notion of the Church of England as a pillar of Toryism was becoming out of date; wet parsons, agonizing about unemployment, symbolized its future stance. William Temple, son of an archbishop, could hardly be regarded as an unrepresentative figure, as he trod the path of preferment from Bishop of Manchester in the 1920s to Archbishop of York in the 1930s; yet he became the leading spokesman of a social Christianity which was plainly on the left of the political spectrum. It was Temple who was to establish the term ‘welfare state’; and Temple – ‘the only half-crown article in a sixpenny bazaar’ – whom Churchill felt unable to pass over when the see of Canterbury became vacant in 1942.
CULTURE AND POLITICS
The cult of ‘Bloomsbury’ has flowered too luxuriantly for many tastes in the twentieth century. The fact remains that a variously but indisputably talented group of writers – the work of the painters Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant has lasted less well – thrived on mutual friendships originally formed among a group of (male) undergraduates at Cambridge. There was a homoerotic bond here, notably between Lytton Strachey, Duncan Grant and Maynard Keynes: this clearly helped reinforce the revolt against the respectable late-Victorian conventions, which Strachey’s volume of biographical essays Eminent Victorians (1918) subjected to an exquisite literary assassination by a thousand digs. The book had an amazing success and inspired countless ‘debunking’ biographies in its wake. The marriage in 1912 of the high-minded Fabian socialist Leonard Woolf to Virginia Stephen (her sister Vanessa married the art critic Clive Bell) completed the Bloomsbury nexus, physically centred on this socially marginal area of London, between Euston Station and the British Museum, with the town houses in its fine squares then undervalued. Here, in the basement of their house in Tavistock Square, the Woolfs ran the Hogarth Press, which they had set up partly as therapy for Virginia’s unstable mental state and partly as an outlet for new, young and – above all – modern authors.
Bloomsbury was already notable for championing the avant-garde: for example, London’s first post-Impressionist exhibition, organized by Roger Fry, which created a highly satisfactory furore in 1910. The roots of modernism may have been pre-war but its cultural impact in Britain was felt in the 1920s, through a palpable change of generations. It was then, for example, that the sculptors Jacob Epstein and Eric Gill, though dogged by charges of obscenity, achieved public recognition for their stylized (and sometimes erotic) work – both had crucial commissions for the London Transport headquarters in the late 1920s, Gill later for the BBC at Broadcasting House too. In music, 1920 saw Elgar fall silent (after the great but initially under-performed cello concerto), and instead the young William Walton begin his association with the Sitwells which produced Façade (1923), the quintessence of the twenties, matching Edith Sitwell’s recitation with Walton’s high pastiche, drawing on the popular rhythms of jazz.
Modern art and modern music, like modern architecture and design, were nothing if not international; and these were fields in which Britain was famous for lagging – unlike literature, where a patriotic sense that the national heritage was at stake pervaded some ostensibly aesthetic judgements. E. M. Forster, though identified with Bloomsbury, worked within an established English literary tradition. In A Passage to India (1924) he used the novel almost as George Eliot had done, to illuminate the social relationships of a whole community through a multifaceted understanding of the misunderstandings between the British and the subjects of their Raj. This achievement simultaneously extended Forster’s fictional range and exhausted his fictional oeuvre. Nonetheless it was in 1924 that Virginia Woolf proclaimed that ‘we are trembling on the verge of one of the great ages of English literature’. Here modernism was nothing if not eclectic and, surely not coincidentally, often the literature of exiles.
Ezra Pound, an American poet who arrived in London in 1908, played an extraordinary role, something between entrepreneur and amanuensis. He was for a time secretary to W. B. Yeats, an Irish nationalist who actually chose to spend the larger proportion of his life in London. Yeats captured many of his countrymen’s dilemmas and made them part of our twentieth-century sensibility: ‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.’ Yeats’s spare images of the Easter Rising – ‘A terrible beauty is born’ – became central to its perceived role in creating the country which was to honour him as its most distinguished son by making him a senator.
The only honour that the Free State did for James Joyce was to stop his countrymen reading him. An Irish emigré, his stream-of-consciousness novel Ulysses made its hero’s peregrinations around Dublin during 16 June 1904 into a modern myth, rendered with a mimetic fidelity – to both immediate experience and its imaginative recall – which held the power to shock. The struggle to get it published, in which Pound was instrumental, made Ulysses famous as a banned book; too scatological to be published in Britain (though it was offered to the Hogarth Press), it circulated in smuggled copies of the 1922 Paris edition for forty years. Joyce spent the rest of his life labouring on a gigantic further experiment in juggling words, myths and memories: Finnegans Wake (1939).
Pound’s greatest literary coup was as midwife of T.S. Eliot’s uniquely influential poem, The Waste Land, of which Hogarth published the British edition in 1923. Eliot was a fellow American exile; his was a talent which Pound had spotted years before, with its power of allusion and suggestion that Pound’s blue pencil now rescued from simple parody. Eliot’s original title for the poem was ‘He Do the Police in Different Voices’ – a clue to the modernist ambition to make poetry not by adopting a self-consciously elevated diction but by sending up the patterns of demotic speech, just like music hall, which had long had its own ‘impressionists’.
When Lil’s husband got demobbed, I said –
I didn’t mince my words, I said to her myself,
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME.
Like Ulysses, which he admired, Eliot appropriated the epiphenomena of popular culture and the mundane trappings of industrial civilization for high art. ‘We’re not as good as Keats,’ Virginia Woolf said to him. ‘Yes, we are,’ Eliot responded. ‘We’re trying something harder.’
Eliot, with his later conversion to Anglo-Catholicism and the conservative social views which emerged in the 1930s, may have been ideologically out of kilter with Bloomsbury; but aesthetically they were fighting the same corner. One extraordinary feature of The Waste Land was that it included textual notes, just like the references in a work of scholarship, giving the sources for its clever montage of literary borrowings. Thus: ‘I had not thought death had undone so many (cf. Inferno, III, 57).’ Eliot may only have been padding out the text to make a book of it and protecting himself against charges of plagiarism, but he was in danger of ponderously explaining his own jokes. All of this helped give The Waste Land some notoriety among people who did not normally take much notice of poetry.
Modernism was undeniably an elite movement, fostering a sensibility which only seemed accessible to a minority of self-conscious intellectuals. By the end of the century, Virginia Woolf was regarded as the great novelist to emerge in the 1920s – a perception which feminist perspectives enhanced – but during the 1920s she had a relatively modest following. Only with her historical fantasy Orlando (1928) did sales turn round, spurred here by the frisson of sexual ambiguity which the book purveyed. Unlike Arnold Bennett, whom she publicly made the butt of her scorn for ‘materialist’ fiction, Woolf found her own raw material in her own mind, tangling and occasionally disentangling a skein of memories and perceptions, heightened by a marvellous ear for the spoken word which she caught on the printed page in ways peculiar to herself. If Mrs Dalloway (1925) seemed relatively straightforward (at least after Ulysses), following two characters through the events of their very different days, the more complex vision of To the Lighthouse (1927) presented further challenges. Its portrait of the author’s father, Sir Leslie Stephen, as Mr Ramsay was a joy for insiders. In The Waves (1931) multiple monologues allowed as many as half a dozen characters to interact (though action, in any strict sense, was hardly Woolf’s forte).
Compared with Woolf, Aldous Huxley made a greater mark at the time as a coming novelist. Books like Antic Hay (1923) and Point Counter Point (1928) spoke in the idiom of the 1920s; like the fashionable plays of Noel Coward, they showed the ‘bright young things’, except that in Huxley they were just that much brighter, with intellectual pretensions which his own membership of a distinguished academic family made second nature. In Brave New World (1932) he went on to give a chilling vision of a post-industrial future where ‘our Ford’ was worshipped for the essentially empty satisfaction of induced wants. His parable extrapolated from emerging economic trends – mass production, consumerism, manipulation through advertising – just as George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) would from political trends. They sketched rival visions of dystopia, neither of them faithfully borne out by subsequent history, but Huxley’s insights arguably retaining as much pertinence today as Orwell’s.
Alongside Huxley, and escaping his subsequent eclipse, D. H. Lawrence claimed a place in the sun – literally so as his precarious health drove him on a nomadic quest for fulfilment under southern skies. He died from tuberculosis in the south of France in 1930, only forty-five years old. In less than twenty years, since The White Peacock (1911) and Sons and Lovers (1913) had first made his name, he had taken Bennett-like provincial English settings and Wells-like autobiographical themes of educational aspiration and sexual awakening, and put his own stamp upon them. The Rainbow (1915), with its passionate sexual undertow, brought Lawrence’s first brush with censorship (a foretaste of the difficulties over his far more explicit later novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which was not published in Britain until 1960). What informed The Rainbow was a densely realized response to the industrial realities of the Nottingham coalfield on which Lawrence had been brought up. Yet what he offered was no working-class novel with a programmatic political moral, but, especially in the sequel Women in Love (1920), a vision invested with Lawrence’s virtually existential insistence on the authenticity of lived experience – not least sensual experience – personal affirmation and commitment.
Such a primacy of imagination over ‘reality’ goes some way to explain why Woolf found herself (to her chagrin) ‘caged’ with Lawrence, as well as Huxley, not to mention the inevitable Joyce, as modernist authors. But if these threatened to become stereotyped categories, they were ones which Woolf had helped establish through her open repudiation of Bennett, Wells and Galsworthy. She came to fear that mainstream, best-selling authors, like her contemporary Hugh Walpole, might ‘dismiss me as an etiolated, decadent, enervated, emasculated, priggish blood-waterish ’ighbrow: as Arnold Bennett used to say’. Walpole’s well-crafted historical storytelling is well represented in Rogue Herries (1930) and as an eminent book reviewer his opinion was golden. J. B. Priestley was another successful ‘middle-brow’ author, achieving fame with his picaresque account of a theatrical touring company, The Good Companions (1929); he wrote perceptively about his native Yorkshire, as did Winifred Holtby in South Riding (1936). These were reputable, serious authors who were read up and down provincial Britain. For all Woolf’s literary recognition in her lifetime – she committed suicide in 1941 – her sales only posthumously exceeded theirs.
The fact is that modernism in literature, paralleling movements towards abstraction in art and music more common in Continental Europe, seemed foreign to a loyal reading public, schooled in the historic conventions of the English novel. In a more sophisticated idiom, the Cambridge critic F. R. Leavis was to write of The Great Tradition (1948) in which George Eliot (not Dickens) was a commanding presence. It can be argued that Leavis himself stood in a tradition of public moralists, whose tutelary role he sought to appropriate in the twentieth century through the propagation of English as a university discipline. His didactic definition of the canon was infused with his own affirmation of organic cultural values, as opposed to either shallow commercialism or introverted aestheticism. Though ready to defend Eliot and modernist poetry, Leavis despised Bloomsbury – but championed Lawrence. Plainly, it was not only ‘modernism’ which served to define and divide English writers.
By the mid-1930s, what put intellectuals in one camp or another was, above all, politics. This was most aggressively signalled by the commitment of many young artists, writers, poets – and scientists too – to Communism. The context was the apparent collapse of capitalism, or at least of prosperity throughout the capitalist world, in the early 1930s. At home the National Government looked like a put-up job by the old men, like a further betrayal of the now disillusioned young. There had been the culpable slaughter of the Great War, testified by the spate of anti-war literature which belatedly gushed from the press; and there had been a betrayal of the returning heroes, consigned to the dole queues. The extreme left was not the inevitable beneficiary of the perceived bankruptcy of bourgeois politics, still less of the new cry for action, which was, after all, virtually personified by Sir Oswald Mosley, who angled his British Union of Fascists towards ex-servicemen. Nonetheless, action usually meant Communism. Pacifism and Marxism offered obvious answers. Mass unemployment in the countries of the west tempted those brought up believing in progress to look east, to the great experiment of Soviet Russia, which purported to have banished such evils.
J. B. S. Haldane, a nephew of the Liberal and subsequently Labour statesman Richard (Viscount) Haldane, had proclaimed himself a ‘scientific’ socialist at the end of the First World War. Making his career as a biochemist at Cambridge in the 1920s, his major achievement was to re-establish Darwinian natural selection on the basis of Mendelian genetic theory. Moreover, Haldane showed a gift for popularizing science, in books like Possible Worlds (1927), which gave him a public platform. At this time, however, his transgression of prevailing sexual conventions – the university sought to dismiss him when he was cited in a divorce case – was more conspicuous than his political views. It was the Spanish Civil War which ultimately drew him to Marxism, initially as a supporter rather than as a member of the Communist Party. Haldane was not the only prominent scientist on the far left. Others included the biologist Lancelot Hogben, author of the best-selling Mathematics for the Million (1936), and the distinguished physicist J. D. Bernal, who became a lifelong party-line Communist.
It was not just that the slump discredited capitalism, it also discredited reformist attempts at tinkering with it. To the old Fabians Sidney and Beatrice Webb, the logic was to accept the bureaucratically controlled command economy of the Stalinist state as the fulfilment of their lifetime’s agenda. Their vast tome, more widely cited than read, Soviet Communism: A New Civilization? (1935), was republished under the significantly different title Soviet Communism: A New Civilization (1937). And their friend Shaw, already a declared admirer of the brisk methods of Mussolini, was another fellow-traveller of Stalinism, admiring it from the privileged vantage point of a distinguished tourist. What gave verisimilitude to Communism was not so much the beauty of the actual Soviet alternative as the fact that Marxist theory had always insisted on the rottenness of the capitalist system, reformed or unreformed. Thus the promise of a better life, which was the foundation of liberal faith in progress, could only be redeemed by a more radical strategy – throwing over the attachment to private property which, as the slump now demonstrated, was the fatal flaw in the liberal prospectus. This is what the young poet Stephen Spender meant when he declared: ‘I am a communist because I am a liberal.’
Spender, with his friends Christopher Isherwood and, above all, W. H. Auden, represents this generation of the literary left, who, in more than one sense, grew up in the 1930s. Auden’s early work expressed, with a trenchancy of which he was later ashamed, the brutal choices sanctioned by a Communist morality which invoked the criterion of success – ‘History to the defeated / May say alas but cannot help nor pardon.’ In a polarized Europe, Communist discipline alone promised effective resistance to the rising threat of fascism. Liberals who clung to the niceties of their parliamentary liberties, rather than seeing that the class enemy must be beaten – and could only be beaten – at its own dirty game, were dismissed as ‘Objectively pro-fascist’. Though its determinist doctrine ostensibly rested on economic foundations, the appeal of Communism had a psychological underpinning: yoking an impulse towards action with the necessity of choice. This helped create the mood in which idealistic young Communists, as drunk on their own poetry as Rupert Brooke in 1914, found their destiny in Spain – ‘that arid square, that fragment nipped off from hot / Africa, soldered so crudely to inventive Europe.’
The war broke out in 1936, with General Franco’s armed challenge to the Popular Front Government of the Spanish republic, and dragged on until the republic’s collapse in 1939. A knotty, messy, intractably Spanish conflict, with long historical roots, became a symbolic struggle between democracy and fascism. Seen through British eyes, it almost seemed a poets’ war from the great literary outpouring it generated. This overlooks the diverse and widespread support for the republic on the left in Britain, ranging from liberal constitutionalists to Trotskyists, and the extent to which the battalions of the International Brigade were recruited from volunteers like unemployed members of the Glasgow ILP rather than articulate and well-connected Cambridge graduates, like the poets John Cornford and Julian Bell (son of Vanessa). Yet the deaths of Cornford and Bell are sufficient warrant of the authenticity of their own commitment. This was signalled in Cornford’s lines, written as he faced ‘the last mile to Huesca’, even as he anticipated his own death: ‘if bad luck should lay my strength / Into the shallow grave.’
Auden lived to become a greater poet, keeping his head down while he recorded ‘the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting’. His rhetoric was more powerful than his ideology (let alone his capacity to apply common sense to political judgements). Auden walked unscathed through the 1930s, like a short-sighted person who had been given a gun, his unawareness of its devastating firepower only matched by the uncertainty of his own aim. He met another gilded youth, the composer Benjamin Britten, through the Post Office film unit, then in its heyday under John Grierson, producing innovative documentaries with a progressive political slant. Britten and Auden were drawn to each other (both were homosexual) and their collaboration in the song cycle Our Hunting Fathers (1936) was the artistic fruit, with the political freight of an anti-fascist subtext. Auden ended ‘a low dishonest decade’ with a poem, simply called ‘1 September 1939’, written in New York, where Britten and his partner, the tenor Peter Pears, shortly joined him. The poem was framed in the familiar ideological language, but in suggesting a personal and aesthetic resolution for such tensions it now signalled Auden’s quest for a religious rather than a political panacea.
George Orwell, who fought in Spain under ILP auspices, came to recognize the machiavellian nature of the Communist Party’s power politics, and memorably reprimanded Auden as blasé for writing of ‘the conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder’. Orwell’s own account in Homage to Catalonia (1938) was perhaps the best book to emerge from the war, but not the easiest to get published. Its hard truths about Spain were politically inconvenient. It did not support the euphemistic cross-party line which held together the bien-pensant coalition of Republican supporters in Britain; it blew the gaff on the internal factionalism within the anti-fascist ranks; it showed Orwell’s capacity for speaking out of turn, thus, as his friends kept warning him, ‘playing into the hands’ of political opponents who would use his unguarded words. These were warnings which Orwell, sometimes in an irritatingly self-regarding way, never learnt to heed; but his ephemeral writings have weathered rather better than those of most of his critics.
NATIONAL GOVERNMENT
The National Government faced a general election in October 1931 with much better prospects than when it had been formed in August. It successfully pinned on Labour the charge of having run away from the crisis; Labour’s own story about a bankers’ ramp went down well enough with its own supporters but did not win it credibility or gain it support. Under Henderson’s leadership, the Labour movement held together, opposing the National Government and its cuts, and expelling Macdonald, Snowden and Thomas, whose status as ‘National Labour’ was purely self-ascribed. The election was Labour versus the Rest; hence even on the same poll as in 1929, Labour would have lost seats. But its poll was also down by 6 per cent, to 31 per cent – almost exactly the same as in 1923 when this share of the vote had yielded nearly two hundred seats and put Labour in office. It was very different in 1931: little more than fifty Labour MPs were returned, even counting a handful of Scottish ILP members. Outside the coalfields, Labour was annihilated. Few ex-ministers were in the new parliament; what with the defection of the MacDonaldites and an electoral disaster which overtook Henderson and rising figures like Herbert Morrison, the parliamentary Labour Party turned to Lansbury as its leader, with the little-known Attlee as his deputy.
The National Government was like the Coalition returned in 1918 in that its majority was largely composed of Conservative MPs – 470 out of 554. It was unlike the Coalition in that it did not have Lloyd George. He now opposed the National Government, calling it a fraud, but could only rely initially on his own family group of MPs from North Wales, four in all (though other Liberals were to join them within twelve months). The Liberals had been swallowed up by the crisis. Sir John Simon led one group, thirty-five strong, who openly identified with the Government as National Liberals and were dependent on increasingly close electoral cooperation with the Conservatives. Able and chillingly ambitious, Simon revived his career as a cabinet minister, progressing through the great offices of state: Foreign Secretary under MacDonald, Home Secretary under Baldwin, Chancellor of the Exchequer under Neville Chamberlain, Lord Chancellor under Churchill. Worthy and chillingly scrupulous, Sir Herbert Samuel, supported by a comparable number of Liberal MPs, was clearly striving to do the right thing in challenging circumstances, rather like a preacher trying his hand as lion-tamer. Whereas the Simonites were swallowed whole by the National Government, the Samuelites were to be spat out.
Samuel as Home Secretary and Snowden as Lord Privy Seal constituted the Free Trade conscience of the newly elected Government. In the general election, everyone had tried to keep quiet about tariffs, since this would have driven the Free Traders back into Labour’s arms, and MacDonald spoke only of ‘a doctor’s mandate’. But everything now pointed towards tariffs: the Conservative majority’s prejudices and protectionist sentiment in the country alike. In February 1932 Neville Chamberlain, the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, had the satisfaction of introducing an Import Duties bill which, he claimed, finally vindicated his father. It brought in modest flat-rate duties on most imports, while on the hot issue of Imperial Preference it did what Snowden had done on the hot issue of economies a year previously – passed the buck to a small advisory committee under Sir George May (again). As a result steeper tariffs were imposed on some manufactures; and a British delegation under Chamberlain was sent to the Imperial Economic Conference in Ottawa.
Ottawa brought a double disillusionment, to Tariff Reformers and Free Traders alike. Chamberlain discovered that negotiating preferential duties did not unlock reserves of imperial goodwill and unity, as he had been brought up to believe. There was tough bargaining before the Ottawa Agreements came into effect in 1932; and their chief impact on Britain was to admit more food imports from the Commonwealth, not to help exporters overcome the protection which the Dominions were determined to keep for their own domestic manufacturing industries. Compared with the late 1920s, exports to the Dominions were over 20 per cent lower in the late 1930s, whereas imports from the Dominions increased, and their trade surplus with Britain doubled. Whoever got the best of the bargain at Ottawa, it was not British industry. But it may have suited British financial interests, with their spokesmen in the Treasury and the Bank of England, rather better.
The crisis marked the beginning of the sterling area, as a group of countries based on the Empire (with the notable exception of Canada) though also including others like Denmark, heavily dependent on trade with Britain. When Britain went off gold, so did they; and they used sterling instead for their international trade. Rather than floating freely, sterling became a managed currency, with an exchange rate which (following the US devaluation in 1933) settled down until 1939 at just under $5. Britain’s imports from the sterling area cost no more than before 1931, since everyone had devalued together; and the Bank of England, no longer able to run the gold standard, was at least able to run the sterling area, with everything scaled down to imperial measures. The Dominions remained astonishingly loyal customers of Britain. If they bought less in the 1930s, it was because they could not afford to, because they had been hit worse than Britain by the slump; three-quarters of New Zealand’s and South Africa’s imports still came from the UK, and over half Australia’s.1 They had heavy sterling commitments in London, for all kinds of debts and invisible charges: commitments which they were enabled to meet only by their privileged access to the increasingly buoyant British consumer market. The British people sucked the dried fruit of Empire to save the sterling area.
None of this amounted to the ‘producer’s policy’ of which old Joe Chamberlain dreamt. But if Imperial Preference amounted to less than the Tariff Reformers had hoped, Ottawa was still too much for the Free Traders to swallow. For several months the cabinet had practised the constitutional innovation of an ‘agreement to differ’, which allowed Snowden and Samuel to oppose their own Government’s tariff proposals. In September 1932, following the Ottawa conference, they resigned. Snowden turned on the National Government for its betrayal with all the venom with which he had denounced Labour a year before, while the Samuelites now joined forces with Lloyd George in opposition. All of this ostensibly turned on the great issue of tariffs, which for thirty years had caused one political crisis after another; yet as soon as tariffs were implemented they apppeared less important, either for good or ill.
It was not protection so much as cheap money which opened the door to economic recovery. Bank rate could hardly go lower than 2 per cent, its level from June 1932 until November 1951 (except for two months at the outbreak of war in 1939). To measure real interest rates, of course, the annual change in the value of money has to be allowed for, which means adding the falling prices of the slump to the nominal rate quoted. The cost of living continued falling, if less sharply than in 1929–31, until some time in 1933; but the sort of industrial prices crucial to investment decisions had already bottomed out in 1932. Thus interest rates really were low and, moreover, they were stable – ideal conditions for investment, once confidence returned.
Here the Government could play a good hand. Its personnel and its avowed policies both inspired confidence among the bankers and industrialists who had been unhappy with Labour. Even protection helped in this sense. The Treasury was able to take advantage of cheap money to effect a massive conversion of the war debt to a lower-interest-rate structure. Total debt charges had claimed over 40 per cent of every tax pound in 1929 but this fell to under a quarter by the mid-1930s. This was another measure of how much it had cost to stay on the gold standard. The Treasury made the best of a situation in which gold had gone and Free Trade had gone, and at least maintained the principles of sound money by insisting that the Budget be balanced. Chamberlain looked the part of an iron chancellor, but was lath painted to look like iron, and his measures avoided making the deflation worse. Ignoring the sinking-fund provision, the only year between 1921 and 1939 when there was an actual budget deficit (albeit a small one) was 1933. It did not matter, since it did not disturb confidence.
The housing boom was the most important stimulus to the revival of domestic investment. New industries were often associated with it, supplying consumer durables literally for the home market, from electric irons to radios, which revolutionized work and recreation alike. There were, for example, 1 million telephones in the United Kingdom in 1922, 3 million by 1938. Science-based industries exploited new technologies, often electrical, and new materials, like plastics, with an increased emphasis on styling in marketing their products. The British motor industry became big business behind a tariff wall; compared with the 1920s, imports halved; exports meanwhile doubled, and so, above all, did the number of private cars on the road. A town like Oxford, the headquarters of Morris Motors, was yanked out of the Middle Ages into a Fordist brave new world (the reverse of what an earlier William Morris had hoped for). The dismay which this transformation caused Evelyn Waugh has been eloquently recorded in Brideshead Revisited (1945); but the perspective of a car worker’s family, able to afford a house on a new estate in Cowley, was somewhat different. In 1934 Oxford had 5 per cent unemployment, Abertillery 50 per cent.
The statistics show how economic recovery gathered pace. The official unemployment figures touched 23 per cent in January 1933 and thereafter maintained a virtually uninterrupted fall, briefly dipping below 10 per cent in the summer of 1937. Money wages of those in work did not fall as fast as prices during the slump; the result was that by 1933 real wages stood 10 per cent higher than in 1929 (17 per cent higher than in 1926). It could be argued that these gains had been bought at the expense of all those who had meanwhile lost their jobs. But this higher average real income was maintained during the revival of employment – as workers came off the dole queue, they were cut in on their share of the new prosperity.
This provided a serviceable platform for the National Government when it came to fight a general election. In June 1935 Baldwin, who had patiently served as Lord President of the Council under MacDonald, changed places with him, bringing the premiership into line with the preponderantly Conservative complexion of the Government. MacDonald had tried to maintain its National credentials, even after the Free Traders had departed, but he was now, in every sense, a sad and lonely figure. Not that Baldwin wanted a rabidly partisan approach, since the fact (or fiction) that this was a National Government allowed him to keep in check the diehard elements in his own party whom he had always fought (most recently over moves towards Indian self-government). In the general election of November 1935 Baldwin was triumphantly returned at the head of 429 MPs, of whom 387 were Conservatives and 33 Simonite National Liberals. Despite some slippage since 1931, the Government won over 53 per cent of all votes cast in 1935.
There was now a proper opposition, led by Attlee, who had done a decent enough job as Lansbury’s deputy to be given a chance as his successor. Labour took over 100 seats from the Government and bounced back to 38 per cent of the vote, fully as good as in 1929. But in a two-horse race this was not good enough. If the 1935 results are compared with those of 1929, the net effect of the 1931 crisis becomes apparent; Labour had stayed level, while the Conservatives had put 10 per cent on their vote, almost entirely at the expense of the Liberals, who ended with less than 7 per cent of the vote and only 21 MPs. The change from a three-party to a two-party system thus put the Conservatives into a commanding position, from which it took a world war to dislodge them.
All that Labour did in the mid-1930s was recover to the level of 1929; and much the same is true of the economy. In 1929 unemployment was already a problem, concentrated in appalling black spots, and even in 1937, at the peak of recovery, it was a problem still. Politically, it might be said, the Government was able to ride out a crisis of capitalism, counting on the haves outnumbering the have-nots, the prosperous south of England outvoting the depressed regions of industrial Britain. Yet this is too simple. Wales had a clear majority against the Government, both in seats and votes, but in Scotland the National vote was not much less strong than in England. True, the Labour vote held up best throughout the 1930s in constituencies where unemployment was highest; but these were also heavily unionized areas where pre-existing Labour loyalties ran deepest. In London, conversely, where a purely economic interpretation would predict support for the Government, Morrison’s formidable Labour machine was going from strength to strength; having won the LCC in 1934 Labour started picking up parliamentary seats well outside the deprived core of the East End that had withstood even the 1931 debacle.
The Conservatives made a more effective, broad-based appeal to the public – not least women voters – than an opposition which still lacked credibility. Where the Government had to be careful was not so much over its record on unemployment but over its treatment of the unemployed. The cuts in benefits were restored in 1934; in real terms benefits were now higher than ever. But what drew blood was the proposal in 1935 for a new Unemployment Assistance Board to take over the long-term unemployed from local Public Assistance Committees (the residual agency of the old poor law) with standard scales of payment based on a household means test. This was a typical measure in the Chamberlain tradition, confident that administrative reform could take the issue out of politics. Instead, when responsibility for those who had been on transitional payments was transferred to the new UAB in January 1935, an unprecedentedly widespread political protest erupted, not only in parliament but spilling into the streets. In Hitler’s Europe, this was a potent warning. The Government backed off; it deferred the changes and bought off the protest with higher scales.
By contrast, policies for tackling unemployment did not achieve such a high profile. To be sure, Lloyd George was talking of a British New Deal, Keynes was advocating a counter-cyclical economic strategy, the Labour Party began talking a Keynesian language, and middle opinion was mobilized behind bien-pensant manifestos, notably The Next Five Years (1935). The Treasury, however, moved cautiously, acknowledging the pragmatic force of some of these arguments, but always constrained by Chamberlain’s overtly political handling of the issue – his announcement of new road-building during the 1935 election campaign, for example. One difficulty, which Keynes acknowledged, was that of dealing with unemployment through a general stimulus of demand when the forces of recovery were already creating bottlenecks. The peaks of structural unemployment in the regions, masked for a time by the enveloping economic blizzard, were now visible.
This provoked a Government initiative ostensibly aiding the depressed areas – or special areas, as they were named – notably the derelict coalfields of Durham and South Wales, the deserted shipyards on Tyneside and Clydeside. The unemployed men of Jarrow, where up to two-thirds were out of work, undertook a well-disciplined march to London in 1936, which provided a stark image of the problem. It was less clear whether the solution was to move the workers to the jobs, by assisting transfer to more prosperous parts of the country, or to move the jobs to the workers, by encouraging inward investment. Little was done, let alone achieved. Lancashire was not classified as a special area, yet in Wigan one-third of the workers were registered unemployed; and if Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier (1937) is not quite the documentary record it purports to be, it is still a fitting literary monument to the darker side of Baldwin’s beloved England.
The sharply different impact of prosperity and impoverishment which people experienced during this period coloured their sharply different perceptions and memories of it. In retrospect the National Government was doubly damned, from left to right, on domestic and international counts. Had such feelings been widespread at the time, the Government could not have polled over half the popular vote, and Britain might have been more susceptible to the extremist politics on offer from the British Union of Fascists (BUF) or the Communists. Mosley, emulating Mussolini in his black-shirted uniform, made a splash with his eye-catching demonstration at the Olympia arena in 1934. But this bubble, temporarily inflated by favourable publicity in Rothermere’s Daily Mail, soon burst. The BUF’s only mass following was recruited by exploiting populist resentments against the longstanding Jewish community in the East End of London; and even here the attempt to reinvigorate BUF support in 1936 backfired when antifascist activists forced Mosley to call off the Blackshirts’ march at Cable Street. The impotence of the police was promptly remedied by a change in the law, which, by banning political uniforms, effectively undercut Mosley’s theatrical appeal – in the end the reason why his Blackshirts were to remain so memorable.
The Public Order Act of December 1936 was one of the last measures of Baldwin’s premiership, his twinges of anxiety allayed by some cause for satisfaction. If, at its peak, the BUF could claim forty thousand members, this was more than double the number in the Communist Party; but it was the Conservative Party, with a membership of up to 1.5 million, that clearly had more proletarian adherents than either. Baldwin’s last months in office, before he chose to retire in May 1937, also saw the abdication crisis neatly defused and a new King and Queen crowned, amid traditional patriotic symbolism, endorsed by protean signs of social solidarity and popular rejoicing (faithfuly recorded on coronation day by the amateur anthropologists of Mass Observation). It did not seem a bad legacy for a Conservative leader to leave.