The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (96 page)

The economic depression created a crisis in the British coal industry. Until 1914 Britain had been the world’s greatest exporter, but many industrialized countries had begun to mine their own coal. The coal industry would have declined more rapidly had it not benefited from France’s invasion of Germany’s Ruhr coalfields. By 1926 the writing was on the wall. As part of the war economy the huge industry had been taken out of private hands and run by the government. After the war the miners did not want the coalfields to return to private ownership because the wages offered were lower than those paid by the government. For several months they refused to return to work, though as a lure they were offered a seven-hour day. The simple truth was that British coal was too expensive. The mine owners asked for wage reductions and slightly increased hours. A Royal Commission of Inquiry achieved little, and the government eventually appeared to come down on the side of the owners when it recommended that the working day go back to eight hours. The miners took their case to the General Council of the Trades Union Congress. On 3 May 1926 a general strike was declared.

But this was not the start of the revolution in Britain that had been feared–and hoped for by Russia. Though the railwaymen, printers, and iron and steel trades came out in sympathy with their fellow workers, it was a social event rather than a political one. There was little professed desire to overthrow the government. The general strike–that formidable weapon by which workers could bring a country to its knees–was not applied very ruthlessly. The responsible, upright TUC had no wish to endanger the country’s health; hospital and agricultural workers were excluded from the strike.

There was some violence by police and union members but after nine days, by 12 May, Britain could breathe again. The general strike had been called off, no revolution had taken place and Britain had kept going thanks to all kinds of enthusiastic volunteers from students to businessmen driving the buses. The working man had the Labour party to represent him in Parliament. Another Labour government would be a better way of making sure his voice was heard than the destruction of the general strike. Britain had no stomach for the way strikes were used abroad, with such lethal effects.

Only the miners remained on strike, staying out for another seven months until December 1926. Once their union funds were exhausted, they had to return to work. The strike had lasting effects on the coal industry. Many coalminers remained out of work because pits could not be reopened. The high rate of unemployment which followed in the industry forced lower wages and longer hours on the miners. To prevent another countrywide stoppage, in 1927 the Conservatives brought in a new Trade Disputes Act. General strikes were outlawed, and henceforth trade union contributions for political ends like supporting the Labour party had to be individually earmarked by the member concerned.

Although the Conservatives had weakened the trade unions, progressive social reform continued. One of the most notable effects of the war was that all parties now accepted that the state should play a far greater role in British life as a beneficent provider. The Ministry of Health, created to deal with insurance and health issues, was not disbanded after the war, as state provision for pensions and insurance continued to expand. The minister of health Neville Chamberlain, Joe’s son, finally did away with the last remnants of the punitive approach to the destitute by abolishing the Elizabethan guardians of the poor. Instead the destitute became the responsibility of county councils, whose Public Assistance Committees provided new buildings and assistance for the old and sick who had nowhere else to go. The Conservative government, which in 1928 carried the Fifth Reform Act allowing women the vote at twenty-one in line with men, brought in a more generous state pension scheme. The Widows, Orphans and Old Age Contributory Pensions Act of 1925 allowed insured people to draw an old age pension at sixty-five and gave pensions to widows and allowances for bereaved children under fourteen.

The Conservatives also established the National Grid which provided cheap state-owned electricity across the country via a wire and pylon system run by the government-owned Central Electricity Board. By 1939 two-thirds of Britain had electricity, though in wilder parts of the country its supply could be less certain. Swans or snow on the line in the Highlands of Scotland often left local people without electricity for a day or two.

The British Broadcasting Corporation, created in 1927 by a group of radio companies, was also set up as a state monopoly owned by the government. Established by royal charter, the BBC was intended to have high ethical standards, which it has largely maintained. Its refusal to take advertising has always given it an editorial freedom and integrity. Soon most homes possessed a wireless. The BBC tradition of high-mindedness and public service broadcasting was encouraged by its first chairman, the Scot Lord Reith, who believed in a mission to improve Britain through his corporation. For many Britons, until the 1944 Education Act established free secondary schooling, BBC Radio served as a form of further education. The impartiality of the BBC, jealously guarded, made it one of the great British institutions of the twentieth century. Envied by other countries it remains a testament to the British love of fair play. The BBC Radio World Service has traditionally been a forum giving political exiles the chance to speak and broadcast to their homelands.

British women’s lives changed dramatically during the war. With three and a half million men called up to fight in France, women had to take over many of their jobs on farms or in munitions factories. Those serving as nurses on the western front earned the heartfelt respect of the men. As a reflection of the new seriousness with which they were viewed, women were admitted to membership of Oxford University in 1920–though it was not until 1948 that they could receive full degrees at Cambridge. Other acts of 1918 and 1919, recognizing their war work, revolutionized the civic position of women by removing sex qualifications for admission to the professions and to seats in the House of Commons. One of the best-known beneficiaries of this was the American-born Nancy Astor. She was the first woman to sit in the House of Commons when in 1919 she took over her husband Waldorf Astor’s seat for Plymouth Sutton after he inherited his father’s viscountcy. She remained an MP for twenty-five years.

When all British women over twenty-one became entitled to vote in 1928, they had stolen a march on their more protected French contemporaries–in France the vote for women only came in 1944. In Switzerland it was 1971. As a sign of their independence, skirts rose and women took up the fashion of bobbing or cutting their hair short, a fashion prompted by the need to keep it out of machinery during the war. The long lustrous locks piled up in elaborate folds so characteristic of the pre-war era vanished.

Jazz music, which began in the black part of New Orleans and spread throughout America, crossed the Atlantic to Europe in the 1920s and became all the rage. Millions of young people bought phonographs to hear recordings and dance the wild Charleston. Such enthusiasms showed that they belonged to the new world which rejected the boring and destructive ideas of the old. Inspired by sheer relief at the ending of the war and by the world’s subsequent recovery, well-to-do people became hedonistic. Instead of being associated with the war, France exploited her holiday resorts such as Juan les Pins and Biarritz, to become the playground of the young, rich and gifted, particularly Americans like the writer Scott Fitzgerald.

Fitzgerald gave this short-lived breathing space between the wars its nickname, the Jazz Age. ‘Seize the day’ was its motto–with so many young people dead, who could say who would be alive tomorrow? A rather desperate frivolity reigned. From the mid-1920s onwards, London theatres were full of Noël Coward’s bitter-sweet sophisticated comedies about world-weary, liberated young people. Divorce–a stigma before 1914–started to become accepted as something that happened. Being realistic, being true to yourself, was what mattered now that so many of the old certainties of European civilization from religion to the army had disintegrated or been found wanting. The young Evelyn Waugh’s cynical and often cruel novels, including
Decline and Fall
(1928) and
Vile Bodies
(1930) were hugely popular.

Despite the weakening of the trade union movement in the aftermath of the general strike, the Labour party returned to power for another two years in 1929. Though Labour had 287 MPs against Conservatives’ 261, and the Liberals had a sorry 59, Labour was still in a minority. Once again an attempt was made to co-operate with the Liberals but it was not very successful. Nineteen-twenty-nine was the year the worldwide great depression began. It started with the Wall Street Crash in America, which wiped millions off the value of shares in October. The newspapers were full of ruined financiers committing suicide by jumping out of skyscrapers.

The Crash put an end to America’s capacity to prop up the European monetary system, as she had done ever since the Great War ended. US financiers were forced to call in their loans. German banks failed. Between 1929 and 1932 the American economy shrank by almost 40 per cent. But the desperation of the unemployed in the dustbowl of America was as nothing to the political effects of the depression in Europe. The economic collapse wiped out responsible democratic governments which world statesmen were relying on to keep the peace.

The truth was that the European economic system had not properly recovered eleven years after the war had ended. In many ways it was not to recover for another seventy years. Europe’s problems had been masked by America’s readiness to bail out the post-war European economies, Germany’s in particular. After the war German goods were not bought by other countries in the quantities needed to rebuild the German economy. They needed to restart their own economies and began to manufacture goods themselves which they had previously bought from Germany. The Russian market, a major source of revenue before the war, after the Revolution was effectively nonexistent. The war-guilt reparations imposed on Germany could not be paid without massive loans from the US, so when the American loans were withdrawn Germany’s economy collapsed in 1929.

German foreign trade fell by two-thirds between 1929 and 1932, wiping out completely the savings of the middle classes. The situation was worse than that of 1923. Professional and well-to-do people went from leading an affluent life to penury, forced to sublet every room of their apartments. The effect hyperinflation had on Berlin, for example, may be vividly glimpsed in the writings of Christopher Isherwood. Conspiracy theories began to circulate, of which the most pernicious were ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’, forged documents purporting to show that there was a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world and ruin everyone who was not Jewish. In their distress the German people not only lost their faith in democracy, they lost their faith in reason. They were looking for scapegoats, and the scapegoats put forward by Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist Party, or Nazis, who were attracting growing support, were Jews, big business controlled by Jews, foreigners, communists and the Versailles Peace Treaty.

In Britain the Conservatives had been voted out in 1929 for failing to solve the unemployment problem. But under Labour in the next two years unemployment soared to levels the country had never experienced before. Factories closed and men started being laid off in massive numbers in the north, in all the industries which had made Britain’s fortune in the past: in coal, the iron and steel industries, shipbuilding, clothing. In some towns like Jarrow in Tyneside, once the home of the Venerable Bede, the unemployment level reached 75 per cent. Investors started to withdraw money from London. By July 1930 unemployment had jumped by almost a million. It was rising so fast that it was expected that one-third of the workforce would soon have no jobs. But the deepening industrial depression was beyond the control of any government because it was due to worldwide pressures and the way the war had thrown international trade into confusion.

This catastrophe left Labour reeling. A rich young Labour minister named Sir Oswald Mosley, influenced by the writings of John Maynard Keynes, in 1930 suggested greater state control of industry and more state-financed public works along the lines of the New Deal that President Roosevelt would use to get America on her feet again. But the Cabinet rejected these remedies and Mosley, who was hot-blooded and impetuous, resigned from the government and from his party. When the New party he attempted to found with six other former Labour MPs had no success, Mosley decided that Parliament was going to be no use to him. In 1932 he dumped the New party and created the British Union of Fascists. He had been deeply affected by a visit to fascist Italy where the system of public works, state monopolies of heavy industry and attempts at economic self-sufficiency gave the impression that the employment crisis had been solved.

Labour under its austere chancellor Philip Snowden believed that retrenchment and ultimately more loans from America were the only way out of the depression. But America had more stringent ideas for balancing the budget than Britain did. Her financiers would not lend the funds required unless the Labour government agreed to reduce the money spent by the state. When MacDonald proposed to the Labour Cabinet in August 1931 that unemployment benefit for the very poorest should be reduced by 10 per cent, as well as the incomes of teachers and members of the armed forces, ministers were so disgusted that most of them resigned. MacDonald therefore formed a National Government with the help of members of both the Conservative and Liberal parties to restore British credit abroad and maintain the value of the pound sterling. Three other Labour members of the Cabinet, including Chancellor Snowden, remained with him. Many members of the Labour party never forgave him for what they regarded as his class treachery.

To counteract severe unemployment in the north the national government in 1934 gave special statutory relief for depressed areas, but ministers seemed unmoved by deputations from the old heavy industries of the north-east, such as the Jarrow Marchers accompanied by their MP Ellen Wilkinson, begging for help. The means test introduced by the government for people unemployed for over six months–which involved public officials entering homes to assess whether household effects could be used to raise an income–intensified the anger of the Labour party against MacDonald. To many, the insensitive way the means test was carried out was a return to the era of the Dickensian workhouse. To this day the term ‘means test’ remains politically unacceptable.