Politics
The House | “A rollicking read”: Baroness Andrews reviews ‘A Shellshocked Nation: Britain Between the Wars’
London c.1920: ‘Flappers’ dancing the Charleston | Image by: Pictorial Press / Alamy
4 min read
Alwyn Turner’s cultural and political history of the interwar years is full of gems
With a title that conjures an image of stumbling columns of gassed men, “shellshocked” appropriately describes a nation, bewildered and traumatised, suspended between the ‘Great Silence’ of armistice and the drum beat of the coming war.
Adding to the vast canon of political and social history, poetry and novels that have tried to pin down these ‘years of illusion’, Alwyn Turner’s book aims for something different: to “take the temperature of the nation” – albeit mainly an English nation.
The nation he portrays is one seeking distraction – and who could blame them? The three political leaders at the outbreak of war, Herbert Asquith (Liberal), Bonar Law (Conservative) and Arthur Henderson (Labour), all lost sons – two in Law’s case. An estimated 1.75 million women were deemed ‘surplus’ to requirements. Postwar hopes of a better world were quickly and bitterly dashed, while class barriers, paramount in the 1926 General Strike, were as high as ever.
While political history provides the architecture – the first aborted Labour government of 1924, the coalition government of 1931, Edward VIII’s abdication in 1936, Oswald Mosley’s rise to power – the soundtrack is an engaging ‘vox pop’, assembled from an impressive excavation of newspapers, popular songs, cinema and radio.
Turner reveals a world of paradox
Thus, Turner reveals a world of paradox catching the tides of two decades – grief and hedonism; license and repression; distress and wealth; conservatism and communism. Moods change with the decades. The Bolshevik bounders of John Buchan’s novels give way to the “golden age of detective fiction” with the toffs (the character Peter Wimsey par excellence) in charge. Gender issues make the news. In 1921, the House of Lords throws out an amendment to the Criminal Law Amendment Bill to make lesbianism a misdemeanour, arguing that it would “put ideas into women’s heads”. In 1928, DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover makes a bold entry.
New stories emerge – sometimes bizarrely. Who knew that TS Eliot had ever written an obituary of the music hall singer Marie Lloyd, or that John Reith would ask BBC candidates if they believed the teachings of Jesus Christ? Reading took on a competitive edge. Through an affordable subscription, the Daily Herald furnished two million homes with a set of the complete works of Charles Dickens (we had one at home in Tredegar) at a greatly discounted cost (£1.7s the lot). While the nation felt better together (voluntary and community activities thrived, as did trade unions and political parties), buying on credit, motor cars and the advent of Butlins in 1936 (the first in Skegness opened by aviator Amy Johnson!) widened horizons. By 1930, London had one cinema seat for every 20 people.
But when it counts, another spirit surfaces. Time has run out. As Britain stands alone after the fall of France, the Daily Mail writes: “We alone defend the conscience of the world.” As the light faded on those two volatile decades, balanced between promise and despair, the words of Robert Graves a decade earlier, ‘Goodbye to All That’, took on a new and serious intent – a postwar world which had no place for hedonism, committed to the rebuilding of nations and a new world order.
Baroness Andrews is a Labour Peer
A Shellshocked Nation: Britain Between the Wars
By: Alwyn Turner
Publisher: Profile Books
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