THE FOLIO SOCIETY

A social history of Great Britain 1918–39

After the horrors of the First World War, Britain basked delightedly in the full sunshine of peace. For some there was the social whirl of polo, hunt balls and the Henley Regatta, for others the races, or a day at the beach. But the glitter of the ‘Roaring Twenties’was tarnished by shabby politics, housing shortages and the General Strike.

Whilst Britain remained divided between the governing rich and governed poor, social mores were revolutionised. Everything American was fun – films, jazz, cocktails, lipstick and chewing gum. Shingled hair and short skirts epitomised women’s new-found freedom, while the invention of vacuum cleaners and gas ovens made it a reality. Attitudes to sex became more liberal, and intriguing new terms (‘inferiority complex’, ‘sadism’, ‘libido’) were bandied across the tea cups or the mah-jong table. ‘Relativity’was the new buzz word, and the world grew smaller when two uncelebrated Australians, McIntosh and Parer, flew from England to Melbourne.

Striding across this colourful canvas are the extrovert characters of the age – Lloyd George, Dame Nellie Melba, Virginia Woolf, Wallis Simpson, Christopher Isherwood, Charlie Chaplin, D. H. and T. E. Lawrence, Lord Beaverbrook, Chamberlain, Churchill ... The Long Weekend takes us through headline-grabbing events like the Wall Street Crash, Edward VIII’s abdication, the Depression and the rise of fascism, but also the illuminating detail of reading habits (‘pulp’fiction and the gossip column), fashion (tubular dresses and cloche hats), fads (nudism and rambling), art, religion and sport.

A joint project by Robert Graves, creator of I, Claudius, and Alan Hodge, Churchill’s collaborator on his History of the English-Speaking Peoples, The Long Weekend was published soon after the Second World War, its frequently anecdotal style lending a freshness and immediacy. This edition is introduced by noted historian Juliet Gardiner and features dozens of evocative photographs and illustrations of Britain between the wars.

The Living Story of the Twenties and Thirties

MARTIN PUGH

Author and historian Martin Pugh (most recently of We Danced All Night: A Social History of Britain Between the Wars), provides the setting for Robert Graves and Alan Hodge’s The Long Weekend.

I have always thought of The Long Weekend as an unintentional antidote to an equally famous book published in 1940: Guilty Men, the condemnation of Neville Chamberlain, Samuel Hoare and Sir John Simon over appeasement and Britain’s unpreparedness for war. Graves and Hodge seem to have had this in mind as they admitted in later editions that they decided to leave their original views unaltered since ‘they reflect the spirit of the frustrating Monday between the outbreak of war and the shock of Dunkirk that followed the Long Weekend’. Written in haste and with verve and pace, the book captured the fast fading joie de vivre of the inter-war years.

It is a wonderfully exuberant, chaotic account of English society written, one feels, with tongue in cheek. The authors cheerfully admitted that the book must be full of errors as a result of their reliance on newspapers, yet they declare on the next page ‘it is intended to serve as a reliable record of what took place of a forgettable sort’ – language that puts one in mind of Sellar and Yeatman’s 1066 And All That, published in 1930. Both reflect a very English sense of humour and irreverence towards serious topics. As if to deter the serious reader Graves and Hodge originally dispensed with an index, and added to his difficulties by organising the book in twenty-six chapters that are neither quite thematic nor chronological. Thus, for example, ‘The Days of the Loch Ness Monster’ is situated somewhere around 1933 and deals with, among other things, aviation, crime, sport, health, film, the press and novels. You never quite know where you are or what is going to come up next. Disarmingly the authors declared that, despite their four hundred pages, they might have included even more topics ‘had we thought of them’, but they invite the reader to ‘fill the gaps in for yourself, please’. And they were candid enough to say that a score of books could be written on the same topic, each completely different from the rest.

Which, of course, they have. During the post-1945 era most people took their idea of inter-war Britain from 1930s authors including Vera Brittain, George Orwell, Walter Greenwood and Ellen Wilkinson who wrote of the tragedy of the post-war generation and the misery caused by mass unemployment. In this context The Long Weekend soon came to appear old-fashioned in as much as it passed relatively lightly over the depressing economic aspects of the period. In the chapter entitled ‘The Depression, 1930’ the authors are soon diverted by the personalities of politics and the press rather than the gritty details of unemployment and poverty. In ‘Recovery, 1935’ they mention the Special Areas Act before moving on to some livelier topics including the British Union of Fascists, civil liberties, George V’s Silver Jubilee and the abdication of Edward VIII.

But in highlighting the vitality of inter-war leisure and consumerism Graves and Hodge were by no means wrong. We now recognise that for most of the 1920s and 1930s, including the worst years of the slump, real wages improved because the price of food, clothing and housing fell faster than money wages. It was this that gave ordinary people the extra purchasing power to indulge in the cinema tickets, radios, dances, cigarettes, football pools, fashionable clothes and cosmetics that feature throughout The Long Weekend. Nor did consumerism extend only to minor luxuries, for the cost of motor cars and houses also fell massively between the 1920s and 1930s, bringing them within reach of all classes in society. This had major and enduring consequences, both economic and political, in creating the society of obsessive home-owners and inveterate shoppers that the British became in the second half of the twentieth century.

Graves and Hodge also appeared unfashionable in the extensive treatment they gave to members of the Royal Family who, beyond token references to the Silver Jubilee and the abdication, largely disappeared from serious accounts of political and social history. However, as a result of the current interest in the loss of British national identity, attention is beginning to shift back to the part played by the monarchy at least up to the 1950s and 1960s in fostering and sustaining a sense of Britishness. One notices that Graves and Hodge were more in touch with popular reactions to the great royal crisis of 1936 when Edward VIII abdicated. A succession of biographies and accounts of the abdication have tended to follow the contemporary Establishment line that the King’s marriage was not popular and that his abdication was inevitable. But Graves and Hodge’s account reflects what is now increasingly evident from a variety of sources, including the mass-circulation newspapers, that most ordinary people sympathised strongly with the King and were appalled at losing him, and that when prime minister Baldwin made sweeping claims about ‘the Empire’ being opposed to the marriage he had consulted no one but a handful of upper-class members of the Establishment.

The Long Weekend also strikes a modern note in the extensive treatment given to women, albeit largely in terms of short skirts, cropped hair, the decline of the corset, smoking in public, erotic dances and the cultural influence of America. Today many would regard this perspective as frivolous and patronising towards women, though, again, it does capture much of the carefree spirit of the time. The authors implicitly recognised that for many British women post-war emancipation took the form of a wider pattern of leisure and a less restricted lifestyle rather than the newly won vote or roles as MPs, JPs and lawyers that were open to them following the reforms of 1918 and 1919. Graves and Hodge reflected shifting attitudes towards women in their analysis of the use of the term ‘flapper’ which had been a way of referring to prostitutes back in the 1890s. By the Edwardian period it was used for a girl with a boyish figure, and by 1918 for an active, sporting young woman. During the 1920s it again became a term of disparagement being applied to adult women who were thought to behave irresponsibly or who inclined to immorality. They noticed the post-war reaction against female workers in industry and transport and recognised that most young women were turning towards marriage in the 1920s despite the clamour about the lack of husbands and the supposed irresponsibility of the flapper generation.

From today’s perspective the one dimension that does seem notably missing from The Long Weekend is the regional one. Yet it was during the1920s and 1930s that regions such as Lancashire, Yorkshire, Wales and Scotland, that had developed an immense pride during the Victorian era as a result of their success in manufacturing and exporting, suddenly felt their economies collapsing beneath them and began to lose their young men in the migration to the more buoyant economy of the South. Scotland certainly makes its appearance in the book but in the form of a series of Scots characters such as Harry Lauder, Compton Mackenzie, John Buchan and Ramsay MacDonald, that is as ‘British’ figures. The most extended treatment of Scotland takes the form of the revival of interest in the Loch Ness Monster around 1933 following the construction of a new road on the north side of the loch. Their account tells us a good deal about English attitudes, especially members of the scientific Establishment who, without any evidence, pronounced the monster to be a giant eel, an otter, a floating log and even a hippopotamus – if it was not simply the product of Scottish delusions. Not surprisingly the inter-war years saw a revival of cultural nationalism in Scotland and Wales, triggered by economic discontent, that undermined support for the Union with England. Although the political expressions of this nationalism were weak because of the hold exercised by the Labour and Conservative parties, which were almost equally wedded to the Union, it is now clear that modern nationalism built its foundations in this period.

However, this was not apparent to most contemporaries. With their usual candour Graves and Hodge recognised the cultural–geographical limitations of their idea of ‘Britain’; London and its environs assumed a wholly disproportionate role in the book, ‘but this could not be helped; the tendency was for things either to happen first in London or to be first noted there’. They were products of an era stretching roughly from Edwardian times to the 1960s in which London gradually loomed larger in national life because of its population growth, the development of industry in the south-east, the decline of the provincial press and the rise of the BBC as the expression of national sentiment. In some ways the 1930s accentuated this evolution and doubtless influenced the assumptions that informed the perspective in which Graves and Hodge saw British society.