Interwar period
| Periods in English history | |
|---|---|
| Roman Britain | Circa 43–410 |
| Anglo-Saxon | Circa 500–1066 |
| Norman | 1066–1154 |
| Plantagenet | 1154–1485 |
| Tudor | 1485–1603 |
| Elizabethan | 1558–1603 |
| Stuart | 1603–1714 |
| Jacobean | 1603–1625 |
| Carolean | 1625–1649 |
| (Interregnum) | 1649–1660 |
| Restoration | 1660–1688 |
| Georgian | 1714–1830 |
| Regency | 1830–1837 |
| Victorian | 1837–1901 |
| Edwardian | 1901–1914 |
| First World War | 1914–1918 |
| Interwar | 1918–1939 |
| Second World War | 1939–1945 |
| Postwar | 1945–1981 |
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In the United Kingdom, the interwar period (1918–1939) was a period of relative stability after the division of Ireland, despite economic stagnation. In politics, the Liberal Party collapsed and the Labour Party became the main challenger to the dominant Conservative Party throughout the period. The Great Depression affected Britain less severely economically and politically than other major nations, although some areas still suffered from severe long-term unemployment and hardship, especially mining districts and in Scotland and North West England.
Historian Arthur Marwick sees a radical transformation of British society resulting from the Great War, a deluge that swept away many old attitudes and brought in a more egalitarian society. He sees the famous literary pessimism of the 1920s as misplaced, arguing there were major positive long-term consequences of the war for British society. He points to an energized self-consciousness among workers that quickly built up the Labour Party, the coming of partial women's suffrage, and an acceleration of social reform and state control of the economy. He sees a decline of deference toward the aristocracy and established authority in general, and the weakening among the youth of traditional restraints on individual moral behavior. The chaperone faded away; village chemists sold contraceptives. Marwick says that class distinctions softened, national cohesion increased, and British society became more equal during the period.
Society and culture
The English people were largely ethnically homogeneous during the interwar era, except for the Chinese communities in Liverpool, Swansea, and the East End of London. Although regional accents continued to be spoken they were on the decline and full dialects became extinct outside of literature. The 1921 census revealed that there were more women than men in the population by the margin of one million and three quarters, which was largely caused by a higher infant mortality rate amongst males (with wartime losses a contributory factor). The Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919 enabled women to join the professions and professional bodies, although the majority of women remained dependent on their husbands, especially in working class households. In most jobs women were paid less than men.
Religion
While the Church of England was historically identified with the upper classes, and with the rural gentry, William Temple (1881–1944) was both a prolific theologian and a social activist, preaching Christian socialism. He served as bishop of Manchester and York, and in 1942 became Archbishop of Canterbury. He advocated a broad and inclusive membership in the Church of England as a means of continuing and expanding the church's position as the established church. Temple was troubled by the high degree of animosity inside, and between the leading religious groups in Britain. In the 1930s he promoted ecumenicism, working to establish better relationships with the Nonconformists, Jews and Catholics, managing in the process to overcome his anti-Catholic bias.
Prayer Book crisis
Parliament had governed the Church of England since 1688 but was increasingly eager to turn control over to the church itself. It passed the Church of England Assembly (Powers) Act 1919 to establish the Church Assembly, with three houses for bishops, clergy, and laity and permitted it to legislate regulations for the Church, subject to formal approval of Parliament.
A crisis suddenly emerged in 1927 over the Church's proposal to revise the 1662 "Book of Common Prayer", which had been in daily use for more than 250 years. The goal was to better incorporate moderate Anglo-Catholicism into the life of the Church. The bishops sought a more tolerant, comprehensive established Church. After an internal debate, the Church Assembly gave its approval. Evangelicals inside the Church, and Nonconformists outside, were outraged because they understood England's religious national identity to be emphatically Protestant and anti-Catholic. They denounced the revisions as a concession to ritualism and tolerance of Roman Catholicism. They mobilized support in parliament, which twice rejected the revisions after intensely heated debates. The Anglican hierarchy compromised in 1929, while strictly prohibiting extreme and Anglo-Catholic practices.
Divorce and the abdication of the King
Standards of morality in Britain changed dramatically after the world wars, in the direction of more personal freedom, especially in sexual matters. The Church tried to hold the line, and was especially concerned to stop the rapid trend toward divorce. In 1935 it reaffirmed that, "in no circumstances can Christian men or women re-marry during the lifetime of a wife or a husband." The Archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Gordon Lang, held that the King, as the head of the Church of England, could not marry a divorcée. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin objected vigorously, noting that "although it is true that standards are lower since the war it only leads people to expect a higher standard from their King." Baldwin was supported by his Conservative Party (except Churchill), as well as the Labour Party, and the prime ministers of the Commonwealth. King Edward VIII therefore was forced to abdicate the throne in 1936 when he insisted on marrying an American divorcée. Although public opinion gave him considerable support, elite opinion was hostile, and he was practically forced into exile. Archbishop Lang in a radio broadcast lashed out, blaming the upper-class social circles that Edward frequented:
- Even more strange and sad it is that he should have sought his happiness in a manner inconsistent with the Christian principles of marriage, and within a social circle whose standards and ways of life are alien to all the best instincts and traditions of the people....Let those who belong to this circle know that to-day they stand rebuked by the judgment of the nation which loved King Edward.
Edward's biographer Philip Ziegler argues that Edward was poorly prepared to be King, because of deep personal weaknesses; he was inconsistent, superficial and incapable of resisting distractions, and handled the constitutional issues poorly.[256] Frank Mort argues that cultural historians have read the abdication story not so much as a constitutional crisis, but as an indicator of:
- The ascendancy of a female ethos of domesticity and privacy....Intense interest in the King's affair ...[exemplified] this obsession with personal life, which was itself part of the media-fuelled emotional character of the late 1930s.
John Charmley argues in the history of the Conservative Party that Baldwin was pushing for more democracy, and less of an old aristocratic upper-class tone. Monarchy was to be a national foundation, whereby the head of the Church. the State, and the Empire, by drawing upon 1000 years of tradition, could unify the nation. George V was an ideal fit: "an ordinary little man with the philistine tastes of most of his subjects, he could be presented as the archetypical English paterfamilias getting on with his duties without fuss." Charmley finds that George V and Baldwin, “made a formidable conservative team, with their ordinary, honest, English decency proving the first (and most effective) bulwark against revolution.” Edward VIII, flaunting his upper-class playboy style, suffered from an unstable neurotic character. He needed a strong stabilizing partner—a role Mrs. Simpson was unable to provide. Baldwin's final achievement was to smooth the way for Edward to abdicate in favor of his younger brother who became George VI. Father and son both demonstrated the value of a democratic king during the severe physical and psychological hardships of the world wars, and their tradition was carried on by Elizabeth II.
Newspapers
After the war, the major newspapers engaged in a large-scale circulation race. The political parties, which long had sponsored their own papers, could not keep up, and one after another their outlets were sold or closed down. Sales in the millions depended on popular stories, with a strong human interesting theme, as well as detailed sports reports with the latest scores. Serious news was a niche market and added very little to the circulation base. The niche was dominated by The Times and, to a lesser extent, The Daily Telegraph. Consolidation was rampant, as local dailies were bought up and added to chains based in London. James Curran and Jean Seaton report:
after the death of Lord Northcliffe in 1922, four men–Lords Beaverbrook (1879–1964), Rothermere (1868–1940), Camrose (1879–1954), and Kemsley (1883–1968)–became the dominant figures in the inter-war press. In 1937, for instance, they owned nearly one in every two national and local daily papers sold in Britain, as well as one in every three Sunday papers that were sold. The combined circulation of all their newspapers amounted to over thirteen million.
Just over half of homes purchased a daily newspaper in 1939. The Times of London was long the most influential prestige newspaper, although far from having the largest circulation. It gave far more attention to serious political and cultural news. In 1922, John Jacob Astor (1886–1971), son of the 1st Viscount Astor (1849–1919), bought The Times from the Northcliffe estate. The paper advocated appeasement of Hitler's demands. Its editor Geoffrey Dawson was closely allied with Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and pushed hard for the Munich Agreement in 1938. Candid news reports by Norman Ebbutt from Berlin that warned of warmongering were rewritten in London to support the appeasement policy. In March 1939, however, it reversed course and called for urgent war preparations.
The daily newspaper most respected abroad was the Liberal Manchester Guardian. The Conservative Morning Post generally took a diehard position and its typical reader was portrayed as a retired senior officer and his family. The Daily Telegraph was a businessman's newspaper and had the largest advertising space of any paper, while The Daily Mail appealed predominantly to middle-class and lower-middle-class readers, and was the first paper to cater to women and children. The only newspaper intended specifically for working-class readers was the Labour Daily Herald, which had a circulation of 100,000. The most important literary periodical during the interwar years was The Times Literary Supplement.
Expanded leisure
As leisure, literacy, wealth, ease of travel, and a broadened sense of community grew in Britain from the late 19th century onward, there was more time and interest in leisure activities of all sorts, on the part of all classes. Drinking was differentiated by class, with upper-class clubs and working-class and middle-class pubs. However, drinking as a way of spending leisure time and spare cash declined during the Depression and pub attendance never returned to 1930 levels; it fell far below prewar levels. The majority of pubs were divided into public bars and saloon bars. The saloon bars catered for those who paid an extra halfpenny a pint on beer in exchange for more select company and slightly better furniture. Public bars were often spare of ornamentation except for advertisements and a dart board, which was not found in the saloons.
Taxes were raised on beer, but there were more alternatives at hand, such as cigarettes (which attracted 8/10 men, and 4/10 women), talkies, dance halls, and Greyhound racing. Football pools offered the excitement of betting on a range of results. New estates with small, inexpensive houses offered gardening as an outdoor recreation. Church attendance declined to half the level of 1901.
The annual holiday became common. Tourists flocked to seaside resorts; Blackpool hosted 7 million visitors a year in the 1930s. Organized leisure was primarily a male activity, with middle-class women allowed in at the margins. Participation in sports and all sorts of leisure activities increased for the average Englishman, and his interest in spectator sports increased dramatically. By the 1920s the cinema and radio attracted all classes, ages, and genders in very large numbers, with young women taking the lead. Working-class men were boisterous football spectators. They sang along at the music hall, fancied their pigeons, gambled on horse racing, and took the family to seaside resorts in summer. Political activists complained that working-class leisure diverted men away from revolutionary agitation.
Cinema and radio
The British film industry emerged in the 1890s, and built heavily on the strong reputation of the London legitimate theatre for actors, directors, and producers. The problem was that the American market was so much larger and richer. It bought up the top talent, especially when Hollywood came to the fore in the 1920s and produced over 80 percent of the total world output. Efforts to fight back were futile — the government set a quota for British-made films, but it failed. Hollywood furthermore dominated the lucrative Canadian and Australian markets. Bollywood (based in Bombay) dominated the huge Indian market. The most prominent directors remaining in London were Alexander Korda, an expatriate Hungarian, and Alfred Hitchcock. There was a revival of creativity in the 1933–45 era, especially with the arrival of Jewish filmmakers and actors fleeing the Nazis. Meanwhile, giant palaces were built for the huge audiences that wanted to see Hollywood films. In Liverpool 40 percent of the population attended one of the 69 cinemas once a week; 25 percent went twice. Traditionalists grumbled about the American cultural invasion, but the permanent impact was minor.
In radio, British audiences had no choice apart from the highbrow programming of the BBC, which had a monopoly on broadcasting. John Reith (1889 – 1971), an intensely moralistic engineer, was in full charge. His goal was to broadcast, "All that is best in every department of human knowledge, endeavor, and achievement... The preservation of a high moral tone is obviously of paramount importance." Reith succeeded in building a high wall against an American-style free-for-all in radio in which the goal was to attract the largest audiences and thereby secure the greatest advertising revenue. There was no paid advertising on the BBC; all the revenue came from a license fee charged for the possession of receivers. Highbrow audiences, however, greatly enjoyed it. At a time when American, Australian, and Canadian stations were drawing huge audiences cheering for their local teams with the broadcast of baseball, rugby, and ice hockey, the BBC emphasized service for a national, rather than a regional audience. Boat races were well covered along with tennis and horse racing, but the BBC was reluctant to spend its severely limited air time on long football or cricket games, regardless of their popularity.
Reading
As literacy and leisure time expanded after 1900 reading became a popular pastime. New additions to adult fiction doubled during the 1920s, reaching 2800 new books a year by 1935. Libraries tripled their stock and saw heavy demand for new fiction. A dramatic innovation was the inexpensive paperback, pioneered by Allen Lane (1902–70) at Penguin Books in 1935. The first titles included novels by Ernest Hemingway and Agatha Christie. They were sold cheaply (usually sixpence) in a wide variety of inexpensive stores such as Woolworth's. Penguin aimed at an educated middle-class "middlebrow" audience. It avoided the downscale image of American paperbacks. The line signaled cultural self-improvement and political education. The more polemical Penguin Specials, typically with a leftist orientation for Labour readers, were widely distributed during the Second World War. However the war years caused a shortage of staff for publishers and book stores, and a severe shortage of rationed paper, worsened by the air raid on Paternoster Row in 1940 that burned 5 million books in warehouses.
Romantic fiction was especially popular, with Mills and Boon as the leading publisher. Romantic encounters were embodied in a principle of sexual purity that demonstrated not only social conservatism but also how heroines could control their personal autonomy. Adventure magazines became quite popular, especially those published by DC Thomson; the publisher sent observers around the country to talk to boys and learn what they wanted to read about. The storyline in magazines, comic books, and cinema that most appealed to boys was the glamorous heroism of British soldiers fighting wars that were exciting and just.[300] D.C. Thomson issued the first "The Dandy Comic" in December 1937. It had a revolutionary design that broke away from the usual children's comics that were published broadsheet in size and not very colorful. Thomson capitalized on its success with a similar product "The Beano" in 1938.
Books about the First World War peaked in popularity during the war book revival of 1928–1931. The revival originated in Germany with Arnold Zweig's The Case of Sergeant Grischa (1927) and Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front (1928), which were serialized in British newspapers. Other best-selling war books included Siegfried Sassoon's Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928), Edmund Blunden's Undertones of War (1928), Richard Aldington's Death of a Hero (1929) and Robert Graves's Good-Bye to All That (1929). The most successful play in 1929 was R. C. Sherriff's Journey's End. The war books revived memories of the horrors of the First World War and increased antiwar feelings.
It would also be during this time and stretching into the 1950s and 1960s that the Inklings would start to meet. J. R. R. Tolkien would publish The Hobbit in 1937 and C. S. Lewis would publish The Allegory of Love in 1937. Lewis of course would go on to publish Out of the Silent Planet in 1938 to start his famous Space Trilogy, and would publish The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe in 1950 to start his The Chronicles of Narnia series. Tolkien would go on to publish On Fairy-Stories in 1939 and would publish The Fellowship of the Ring in 1954 to start his "The Lord of the Rings" series.
See also
- More information is available at [ Wikipedia:Interwar_period ]
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