Читать книгу The Thirties: An Intimate History of Britain - Juliet Gardiner, Juliet Gardiner - Страница 9

We have magneto trouble. How, then, can we start up again?

John Maynard Keynes, December 1930

‘It is difficult to see the wood for the trees,’ mused Gerald Barry, then editor of Lord Beaverbrook’s Saturday Review, though soon to resign on a question of principle and start the Week-End Review, and something of a connoisseur of English eccentricities and oddities, in a BBC broadcast on the final day of the 1920s. He rounded off his talk in much the same vein. ‘We cannot put the jigsaw puzzle of the present together, because we are sitting on the pieces.’ In between he surveyed the year that had passed, commenting on the progress of the R100 and the R101 airships, and on the ‘thirst for speed … one of the significant tendencies of our time’, which had been partially slaked by Sir Henry Segrave’s ‘remarkable motor-car record at Daytona Beach of 231 m.p.h.’, and on the extraordinary weather, which ‘began with extreme and prolonged cold which those of us with burst water pipes will not forget in a hurry … followed by a superb summer and a drought which caused many towns and villages great anxiety and stopped many of us watering our gardens and washing our cars’, and ending with ‘disastrous floods and record gales’. The number of motorists had continued to increase, and with them the number of accidents, as had what Barry called the ‘continued uglification of the countryside’. On the credit side Stonehenge, Friday Street, Runnymede and many more ‘notable spots’ had been saved, and in Barry’s mind the fierce controversies over Sir Gilbert Scott’s design for a new power station at Battersea, the erection of pylons across the South Downs as part of the new electrical grid system and proposals for the new Charing Cross Bridge were evidence that ‘in 1929 we have become more conscious of the need of beauty and orderliness in our midst’.

Barry’s notion of sitting on a jigsaw, knowing that there were crucial pieces to be fitted together, but unable to see how they could coalesce, nonplussed by the odd shapes and irregularities of the pieces, the intransigent way one could not be locked with what seemed to be its natural partner to make a satisfying whole, could be a metaphor that would carry all the way from the turn of the decade when he conjured up the image, through the 1930s. It would be a decade of despair and frustration for many, of confusion and stasis, and sometimes, in what seemed a purblind refusal to recognise the true nature of economic and social problems, of government inaction and public despair. Yet paradoxically, this decline would co-exist alongside rising wages and falling prices, a steady increase in living standards, a housing boom and unprecedented growth in domestic consumption. While abroad the thirties would be a decade of escalating tension and the rise of fascism — again met with uncertainty, irresolution, self-deception, misread signals, anxious hopes and missed opportunities — they were also years of experimentation, of hope, of resolution, of a confident belief that modernity had provided the tools with which to fashion a better future, above all a planned future, that mobilised politics, economics, science and the arts to build a brave new world (Aldous Huxley’s novel — albeit a dystopia — was written in 1931 and published the following year). But while, of course, no one could be certain of the picture that would emerge from the disparate pieces at the start of 1930, there was the feeling that the coming decade would be significant. That the thirties would be very different from the twenties. As indeed they would.

The Lady, a magazine for women who lived a leisurely life in society, thought that 1930 ‘somehow assumes an added importance because it is a round number’. The magazine’s columnist was ‘curious’ that given this ‘added importance … most girls do not choose New Year’s Day for their wedding instead of hastening to the altar in December. It seems such a very appropriate day for the beginning of a new life — or, at any rate a new enterprise.’ One society girl did buck the trend in 1930 — though not entirely of her own volition: the wedding of Miss Zelia Hambro, daughter of Sir Percival Hambro of the merchant banking family, had to be rushed as the groom, Lieutenant Patrick Humphreys of the Royal Navy, was about to sail for China at short notice. For the wedding in Holy Trinity church, Sloane Street, Chelsea, the bride chose ‘a really lovely dress, far too good for any festivities on the China station’, and her mother, who was ‘rather keen on politics and belongs to the Ladies Imperial Club’ no doubt enlivened proceedings on the day by being ‘one of the few women in London who smokes cigars — real ones, and not the little affairs provided for women who prefer something stronger’.

There was, however, a more serious investment in marking the end of the 1920s, ten years stained by the memory of the Great War, in which 5.7 million British men had joined the armed forces, of whom three-quarters of a million had been killed and more than one and a half million seriously wounded. Proportionately this was less than the French and German losses, but there was an overwhelming feeling of a ‘lost generation’, as perhaps more than 30 per cent of all men aged between twenty and twenty-four in 1914 were killed in the war, and 28 per cent of those aged thirteen to nineteen. Many of those seriously wounded — physically or mentally — never recovered, and certainly never worked again: the sight of a blind or maimed ex-serviceman trying to scrape a living by selling matches or bootlaces in the street, or simply by begging, was commonplace throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Two and a half million men were sufficiently disabled to qualify for a state pension, which was calculated on a harsh sliding scale: those suffering from the loss of two or more limbs, or major facial disfigurement, qualified for a full pension (27s.6d a week); the loss of a whole right arm brought 90 per cent of that; if the arm was intact below the shoulder but had been amputated above the elbow, or the veteran was totally deaf, that netted 70 per cent, falling to fourteen shillings a week if the amputation was below the elbow or knee, or the sight of one eye had been lost. On the assumption that most men were right-handed, the award was a shilling a week less in each category if it was the left arm that was involved, though if ‘only’ two fingers on either hand had been blown away, a man would receive 5s.6d a week. More than that, the war had come to the Home Front, with air raids claiming some 1,400 civilian lives and leaving 3,400 wounded.

The reminders of the war were material in so many ways. Within months of the Armistice on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, war memorials to commemorate the dead were being built in cities, towns and villages all over Britain, and plaques were being screwed on the walls of railway stations, police stations, depots, schools and factories in honour of ‘the fallen’. On many of them it was difficult to find space to carve the litany of the dead: in Lancashire, for example, the Chorley Pals (which became Y Company of the 11th Battalion, the East Lancashire Regiment) lost 758 officers and men. The architect of Imperial Delhi, Sir Edwin Lutyens, designed a simple concrete altar to those slaughtered in the war to stand in the middle of Whitehall: it would stand like a reproach on an axis that crossed from the Prime Minister’s residence to the War Office. A nameless corpse was selected from those buried as ‘unknown’ near the trench-riddled wastelands of northern France, transported by boat and train in a coffin made from an oak felled at Hampton Court and lowered into a grave just inside the west entrance of Westminster Abbey. Covered with sandbags filled with sand from the Western Front, it was topped with a slab of black Tournai marble from Belgium bearing an inscription that included the words ‘a British warrior unknown by name or rank’. King George V, finding himself — after a slow start — much affected by the notion, attended the funeral service for this poignant representative of Britain’s lost generation on Armistice Day 1920 before unveiling Lutyens’s stark concrete memorial. The ceremony concluded with a haunting rendition of the ‘Last Post’ that seemed to hang in the air.

Within five days over a million people had visited the grave and left hillocks of flowers at the cenotaph, and from that day forward Armistice Day has been commemorated throughout Britain by a two-minute silence as the eleventh hour strikes, those who fought and survived, and those who remembered, bowing their heads, in their buttonholes a fabric replica of the fragile, ubiquitous Flanders poppy adopted by the British Legion as the symbol of the debt owed to those whose blood seeped into the mud of the Western Front.

The new decade had a new government: David Lloyd George’s wartime coalition had ended in 1922 when the Conservatives under Andrew Bonar Law withdrew their support, wishing to re-establish the old party system. Only it wasn’t the old system: no longer was there a Conservative/Liberal duopoly alternating in power as it had throughout most of the nineteenth century, up until the First World War. Henceforth the Labour Party, which had only been founded in 1900, would provide the main opposition to the Conservatives. The Liberal Party had split during the war between those who were loyal to the former leader Herbert Asquith — known as ‘Asquithian Liberals’ — and those who grouped around Lloyd George — the ‘National Liberals’.

After the 1922 election each faction claimed roughly the same number of MPs — between fifty and sixty — but the electoral system, which the Liberals had failed to reform when they had the opportunity, meant that with their support spread thinly across the country and the classes, they were increasingly doomed to be runners-up to Labour in industrial and urban seats, and to the Conservatives in wealthy and rural ones. Labour enjoyed its first taste of government — albeit a brief one — between January and November 1924. On taking power, the Labour Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald had two objectives. One was to dispose of the Liberal Party, the other to prove that Labour was fit to govern. In both he succeeded, although the Liberal Party’s decline was slow. However, by 1929 although the Liberals polled over five million votes, this translated into only fifty-nine MPs, mainly returned from Celtic fringe constituencies around the edge of Britain. By comparison the Conservatives won 260 seats and Labour 287.

The electorate that voted in the second Labour government that year had increased since 1918 by almost 30 per cent to nearly twenty-nine million — 91 per cent of the adult population were now eligible to vote, with women given the vote at the same age as men — twenty-one — rather than thirty, as had been the case when women’s suffrage had first been granted in 1918.

The second Labour government had a small majority and a massive problem: unemployment. The Conservatives had narrowly lost the election campaigning under the slogan ‘Safety First’, copied from a campaign to reduce the number of road accidents. But it seemed that what was needed was less caution, and more action and imagination. The economy was out of balance, with more than a million workers unemployed on average throughout most of the 1920s.

The causes were complex: the war of course was partly to blame. The four years of conflict had cost — in monetary terms — £11,325 million, including loans to allies to help them fight the war; many of these, including those to Russia, would never be repaid. The war was paid for partly out of taxation, partly by liquidating foreign investment, but mainly by loans both from home and overseas. The national debt, which had stood at £620 million in 1914, had risen to £8,000 million by 1924 — the largest slice of it owed to the United States. This led to a vicious spiral: something approaching half the country’s annual expenditure of £800 million went on servicing this debt, meaning that of the revenue raised by income tax, which had risen to an unprecedented five shillings in the pound by 1924, a quarter went towards debt repayment.

Stanley Baldwin, essentially Prime Minister when Ramsay MacDonald was not, that is three times between 1923 and 1937, was a Worcestershire ironmaster whose companies had profited from wartime munitions contracts. Baldwin made an honourable (and discreet) gesture by sending a personal cheque for £120,000 to the Treasury, and there was talk of a national levy. But the problem was not solely debt. The requirements of peace were very different from those of war, and the heavy industries that had expanded to fulfil military needs now found themselves with spare capacity and an export market cut by half, with American and Japanese manufacturers moving into former British markets.

Before the war Britain had been one of the most prosperous countries in the world. After a century and a half of economic growth, expanding trade and shrewd overseas investment, Britain could claim to be among the major industrialised nations and the undisputed hub of international trade and finance. Lancashire cotton mills produced sufficient yarn and textiles to clothe half the world, the shipbuilders of the North-East alone produced a third of the world’s output, Britain was the second largest producer of coal in the world; its merchant fleet accounted for almost half the world’s tonnage, while Britain was a major international creditor with a large inflow of invisible earnings from investments, shipping and insurance.

However, there were serious long-term structural problems that exacerbated the consequences of war. Britain’s prosperity had depended largely on ‘old staples’ — coal, iron, steel, textiles and shipbuilding — which had provided three-quarters of the country’s exports and employed almost a quarter of the working population. At the turn of the century more recently industrialised countries such as Germany and the United States had challenged Britain’s position as the ‘workshop of the world’, and were developing new industries such as chemicals, electrical goods and engineering more rapidly than Britain. The appeal of overseas investment, and a dependence on the Empire as the market for British goods, had led to a neglect of the domestic market and the opportunities offered by these new industries. By 1913 Britain’s economic growth was little more than half what it had been in 1900, and its share of world trade had dropped from a third in 1870 to a seventh by 1914.

The necessities of war boosted Britain’s traditional heavy industries — particularly those linked to the production of munitions and textiles, such as the Scottish jute industry, which was kept at full stretch manufacturing sandbags — and provided a stimulus to accelerate the development of newer ones such as electrical goods, aircraft and motor construction, precision engineering, radio and pharmaceuticals. A post-war boom fuelled by rising prices and the speculative investment of wartime profits lulled people into thinking that the normal rhythms of trade and production would soon be reasserted, and Britain would regain her pre-war markets. Indeed, there was a ‘craze of speculation’ in Lancashire, where old textile mills were bought and sold and new ones constructed in eager anticipation of an export boom, and shipyard owners shared a similar confidence. In 1920 coal still made up 9 per cent of Britain’s exports — only 1 per cent less than in 1913. But the boom was short-lived: by 1921 increases in interest rates and a fall in prices on the world market hit exports, which in turn hit production, and by the winter of 1921–22 more than two million British men and women were unemployed. Cotton textile exports fell to less than half the 1913 figure by 1929, and would never again reach pre-war levels, while coal represented less than 7 per cent of exports: down from 287 million tons in 1913 to forty million by 1922.

It wasn’t only the ‘old staples’ that were in decline: London was losing its pre-war position as the financial capital of the world as the City lost its exclusive authority over monetary policy at home. During the war financial exigencies had forced Britain off the Gold Standard, with the issue of paper £1 and ten-shilling notes that could no longer be converted directly into gold. Financial orthodoxy regarded a return to the Gold Standard as a prerequisite for economic stability: it was essential that the ‘pound should look the dollar in the face’. As far as Lord Bradbury (a former head of the Treasury who chaired a committee appointed in 1924 to advise the newly appointed Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer, Winston Churchill, on the matter) was concerned, it was not so much a question of whether the pound was overvalued in relation to the dollar, as of removing monetary policy from political influence: in his eyes the Gold Standard was ‘knave-proof’. The Governor of the Bank of England, Montagu Norman, agreed: the Gold Standard was the best ‘Governor’ a fallibly human world could have. It was ominously portentous that the notion of the government ‘meddling’ in economic matters was regarded with suspicion and distaste. On the whole gold occupied the same iconic position for the Labour Party, and it was left to the economist John Maynard Keynes, who in The Economic Consequences of Winston Churchill (a title resonant of his Cassandra-like warnings of the effects of harsh reparation payments imposed on Germany in 1919, The Economic Consequences of the Peace), published in 1925, to put the case against, or rather to point out the consequences if the Gold Standard was re-embraced. These included rising unemployment as the bank rate rose and cheap money was denied for industrial investment. In 1925 Britain went back onto the Gold Standard: the bank rate averaged 5 per cent for the rest of the decade, making the country uncompetitive in the world market, particularly against the United States, which was enjoying boom conditions at the time.

How far and how deep would the pernicious stain of unemployment, which throughout the 1920s had never been less than a million, spread? How could men earn a living when the great staples on which Britain’s industrial might had been built over nearly two centuries — iron, steel, textiles, coal, shipbuilding — were losing out to competition from Europe and the United States?

In coalmining areas such as South Wales, the Lowlands of Scotland and Lancashire, the future was bleak. Men had no work in the pits; women were laid off from the textile mills. British exports were no longer competitive in the world market. Labour costs were high — nearly double what they had been in 1914 — whereas the cost of living had only risen by 75 per cent, and the average working week had been reduced by ten hours. In crude terms, those in work were being paid more for working less. Hence the tensions between employers and their workforces — particularly in the mining industry — when international competition undercut prices and eroded markets.

How would Britain be governed, now that the old duopoly of Conservative and Liberal had been definitively replaced by new sparring partners: Labour and Conservative, alternating in power since neither seemed to have satisfactory answers to the country’s economic and social ills. Would the bitter legacy of the 1926 General Strike be gradually softened, even though its collapse had brought no resolution to the fundamental problems that had caused it?

On 24 October 1929 on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, ‘12,894,650 shares changed hands, many of them at prices that shattered the dreams and hopes of those who had owned them’, wrote the economist J.K. Galbraith in his book The Great Crash. Prices on the US market went into freefall, and financial companies as well as individual men and women who had speculated on the over-buoyant American economy lost their fortunes, or their modest savings, overnight. On that ‘Black Thursday’ (which would be followed by ‘Black Monday’ and ‘Black Tuesday’) a record 12.9 million shares were traded: the press reported losses of $30 billion over four days, and there were rumours that eleven speculators had already committed suicide. Watching the ‘wild turmoil’ on the floor from the public gallery of the New York Stock Exchange was Winston Churchill, former British Chancellor of the Exchequer, ‘he who in 1925 had returned Britain to the Gold Standard and the overvalued pound. Accordingly he was responsible for the strain that sent Montagu Norman to plead in New York for easier money, which caused credit to be eased at that fatal time, which, in this academy view, in turn caused the boom. Now Churchill, it could be imagined, was viewing his awful handiwork.’ However, there is no record of anyone having reproached him. Economics was never his strong point, so (and wisely) it seems most unlikely that he reproached himself. But, having invested heavily in the market, he himself lost a large percentage of his savings when it crashed, though he waxed philosophical: ‘No one who has gazed on such a scene could doubt that this financial disaster, huge as it is, cruel as it is to thousands, is only a passing episode.’

The US market continued to decline, reaching its lowest point in July 1932, when it had fallen 89 per cent from its peak in 1929. Unemployment went from 1.5 million in 1929 to 12.8 million, or 24.75 per cent of the workforce, by 1933. ‘Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate,’ the Secretary of the Treasury, Andrew Mellon, had advised. ‘It will purge the rottenness out of the system … People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.’

The Great Depression bit deeper in America (as it did in Germany) than it did in Britain, and lasted much longer, but although J.M. Keynes couldn’t help ‘heaving a big sigh of relief at what seemed like the removal of an incubus which has been lying heavily on the business life of the whole world outside America’, the effect of the Wall Street Crash on trade worldwide would prove deleterious in the next few years. The US government initially raised tariffs against foreign imports and its overseas investment all but dried up, forcing Europe to pay for imports and pay off debts in gold which was sucked into the vaults of America (and France, which had somehow managed to stand aside from the economic crisis). This had serious long-term consequences for the international circulation of money, and led to a collapse in commodity prices and an economic slowdown. ‘Almost throughout the world, gold has been withdrawn from circulation. It no longer passes from hand to hand, and the touch of metal has been taken from men’s greedy palms’ Keynes noted.

Yet, speaking only a matter of weeks after that cacophony of black days in New York and growing anxiety about their effect on Britain’s already ailing, out-of-joint economy, Gerald Barry thought he saw some scattered green shoots, a few straws in the wind that he might clutch at: the summer of 1929 had witnessed a lockout in the cotton industry which was solved, he said, ‘on the principle of rough justice whereby Solomon cut the baby in half’, meaning that each side agreed to accept 50 per cent of what it wanted. He was optimistic that the rapprochement between capital and labour begun in 1929 by the Melchett-Turner conversations (tentative corporatist interchanges between Lord Melchett — or Sir Alfred Mond, as he had been until 1928 — chairman of the recently amalgamated giant chemical firm ICI, and the trade union leader Ben Turner, which ultimately led nowhere) had been ‘further cemented’. And he also saw signs of co-operation paying dividends in agriculture, ‘that Cinderella of home industries’, with initiatives from the Ministry of Agriculture for a series of marketing schemes for foodstuffs such as flour, fruit, eggs and meat.

The shadow of the Great War had darkened the 1920s; in the 1930s men and women would grow to maturity who had no memory of that terrible carnage, and on the cusp of the decades international peace and accommodation seemed assured, with the Labour Foreign Secretary Arthur Henderson’s agreement to withdraw the last British troops from the Rhine. Confrontations between the incorruptible Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Snowden and the ever-rotating French Finance Ministers showed, however, that tensions over the peace treaty of 1919 were by no means entirely relaxed, and the issue of war debts to the United States continued to be a live and fractious issue. Even so, perhaps Barry’s optimism was justified. Perhaps Britain’s economic and social ills really could still be put down to the working out of the dislocations of war, the turbulence could be expected to fade away, the normal rhythms of trade and production would reassert themselves, and British society would return to an equilibrium that it had, in fact, never really known.