Headline Britons 1926-1930 E-Book

Peter Pugh

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 174

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

Headline Britons paints a unique picture of British life in the 20th and 21st centuries by re-examining some of the country's most notable characters. Each book covers a five-year span, telling the stories of a number of people who, in that time, stood out among their contemporaries. As the General Strike of 1926 starkly illustrated, economic hardship continued to be the lodestone of the decade. An American import, the movies, revolutionised entertainment, while William Morris rapidly developed the motor car in Oxford. Peter Pugh brings these five years vividly to life through the stories of gay author Radclyffe Hall – whose seminal The Well of Loneliness also made people think again about sexual norms – John Logie Baird, whose development of the his television in these years presaged another great revolution in everyday life, and the comedian who captured many hearts, Noel Coward.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

About the author

Introduction

Monetary values

Timeline for 1926–30

Timeline for the BBC

List of illustrations

1     The Gold Standard and General Strike

2     Virginia Woolf and the rejection of convention

3     Radclyffe Hall – ‘That night they were not divided’

4     John Logie Baird – ‘Seeing by wireless’

5     William Morris – ‘A Ford with an Oxford education’

6     Ramsay MacDonald – the first Labour government

7     Noël Coward

8     W. Somerset Maugham

9     Looking to the Future

Index

INTRODUCTION

Every publishing season sees the launch of books on famous characters of the twentieth century and many high achievers have more than one book about them. For example, the number of books on Winston Churchill is in the twenties or thirties and recently there was another book on Clement Attlee.

This new series Icon is launching will cover the last 100 years of British history in five-year splits – the first two are 1921–25 and 1926–30 and, as well as giving the background, both social and economic, of those years, will concentrate on the interesting and often misunderstood characters that featured in them.

One of the main characters in this second book, 1926–30, is Radclyffe Hall, the lesbian author who wrote books about homosexuality at a time when it was still frowned upon and indeed was illegal. Also featured is the famous inventor of television, John Logie Baird. Then there is the founder of the first mass-market motor car, William Morris, later Lord Nuffield, as well as the modernist writer Virginia Woolf. Staying with the world of the arts, we shall also discuss the playwright, novelist and short story writer Somerset Maugham, as well as the famous wit, playwright, composer and actor Noël Coward. In addition, Ramsay MacDonald, the first Labour prime minister, was a prominent figure during these years.

MONETARY VALUES

Money and its value is always a problem when writing about a period that stretches over a number of years. Furthermore, establishing a yardstick for measuring the change in the value of money is not easy either. Do we take the external value of the £ or what it will buy in the average (whatever that may be) weekly shopping basket? Do we relate it to the average manual wage? As we know, while prices in general might rise, and have done so in this country every year since the Second World War, the prices of certain products might fall. However, we have to make some judgements. We can only generalise, and I think the best yardstick is probably the average working wage.

Taking this as the yardstick, here is a measure of the £ sterling relative to the £ in 2017.

Apart from wartime, prices were stable for 250 years, but prices began to rise in the run-up to the First World War.

1665–1900 multiply by 120

1900–1914 multiply by 110

1918–39 multiply by 60

1945–50 multiply by 35

1950–60 multiply by 30

1960–70 multiply by 25

1970–74 multiply by 20

1975–77 multiply by 15

1978–80 multiply by 8

1980–87 multiply by 5

1987–91 multiply by 2.5

1991–97 multiply by 2

1997–2010 multiply by 1.5

Since 2010, the rate of inflation, by the standards of most of the twentieth century, has been very low, averaging, until very recently, less than the 1997–2010 Labour government’s originally stated aim of 2.5 per cent (since reduced to 2 per cent). You don’t need me to tell you that some things such as telephone charges and many items made in the Far East, notably China, can go down in price while others, such as houses, have moved up very sharply from 1997 to 2017.

TIMELINE FOR 1926–30

- 1926 -

April

The Duchess of York gives birth to a daughter, Princess Elizabeth

May

A General Strike in support of mine workers is declared. It is the first such strike in British history. It collapses nine days later. Only the miners continue the fight

Rudolph Valentino dies suddenly of peritonitis

August

England wins the Ashes for the first time in fourteen years, beating Australia by 289 runs in the fifth Test

November

An Imperial conference announces that Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Newfoundland are to have dominion status. They will be self-governing, and will have equal standing with Britain within the Commonwealth

Books

Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T.E. Lawrence

Winnie-the-Pooh by A.A. Milne

Films

Ben Hur starring Ramon Novarro (released December 1925 but became popular in 1926)

Don Juan starring John Barrymore

The General starring Buster Keaton

- 1927 -

January

It becomes possible to telephone New York from London at a cost of £15 (£900 in today’s money) for three minutes

May

Charles Lindbergh arrives in Paris after taking 33½ hours to fly solo from New York

November

In the first London-to-Brighton car rally John Bryce’s car is registered as competitor Number 1 Joseph Stalin expels Leon Trotsky and other opponents from the Soviet Communist party

Books

Tarka the Otter by Henry Williamson

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

Films

The Jazz Singer

The Kid Brother starring Harold Lloyd

Flesh and the Devil starring Greta Garbo

- 1928 -

March

The voting age for women is lowered to 21. Now women have the same voting rights as men

May

The Bank of England plans to issue £1 and 10s notes, in addition to the £5 banknotes and larger denominations which are already in circulation

September

Alexander Fleming discovers penicillin

October

The Soviet Union’s first five-year plan begins. From now on, all factories and farms work to fulfil ‘norms’ of production handed down by the state

November

Hirohito is crowned Emperor of Japan

Books

Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence

Orlando by Virginia Woolf

Films

Steamboat Willie, the first Mickey Mouse cartoon

Two Tars starring Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy

- 1929 -

March

A record 66 runners compete in the Grand National at Aintree

June

A Labour government comes to power under Ramsay MacDonaldMargaret Bondfield, minister of labour, is the first female Cabinet member

October

The New York Stock Exchange crashes

Books

Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves

A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

Films

Big Business starring Laurel and Hardy

Bulldog Drummond

- 1930 -

March

Gandhi tells British Viceroy of India to expect civil disobedience

July

Donald Bradman scores record 309 runs in a day

September

National Socialists win 107 seats in German Parliament

Books

Murder at the Vicarage by Agatha Christie

Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome

Films

Abraham Lincoln

All Quiet on the Western Front

Journey’s End

TIMELINE FOR THE BBC

- 1926 -

4 May

The General Strike begins. The BBC broadcasts five news bulletins a day as no newspapers are published

- 1927 -

1 January

The British Broadcasting Company becomes the British Broadcasting Corporation when it is granted a royal charter. Sir John Reith becomes the first director general

15 January

First live sports broadcast on the BBC. The rugby union England vs Wales match is commentated on by Teddy Wakelam

22 January

First live football match broadcast, featuring Arsenal’s home league fixture against Sheffield United at Highbury

January

First BBC reference library established by Florence Milnes

March

The BBC coat of arms is adopted

7 July

Christopher Stone presents a record programme, becoming the first British disc jockey

21 August

The first high-powered regional station (5GB), forerunner of the Midland Regional Programme, opens at Daventry

- 1929 -

20 August

First transmissions of John Logie Baird’s experimental 30-line television system

- 1930 -

9 March

The majority of the BBC’s existing radio stations are regrouped to form the BBC National Programme and the BBC Regional Programme

14 July

Transmission of the first experimental television play, The Man With the Flower in His Mouth

30 September

Number of radio licences reaches 12 million, or roughly every second home in the country

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

1.   Virginia Woolf

2.   Radclyffe Hall

3.   Harold Lloyd

4.   W. Somerset Maugham

5.   Buster Keaton and Marion Mack

6.   Don Bradman

7.   Crowds at premiere of John Barrymore’s Don Juan

8.   John Logie Baird

9.   Ramsay MacDonald

10. Lilian Braithwaite and Noël Coward

11. Morris cars

12. Still from the film of Journey’s End

13. After the Wall Street crash

CHAPTER 1

THE GOLD STANDARD AND GENERAL STRIKE

In 1925 Winston Churchill, then chancellor of the exchequer, took Britain back on to the Gold Standard, the system whereby the pound was defined in terms of a fixed quantity of gold. He would personally have preferred not to. However, many of his advisers, including Montagu Norman, governor of the Bank of England, were in favour as was the Labour party and Churchill’s prime minister, Stanley Baldwin.

In hindsight, the rate at which the currency was fixed was far too high as the pound was pegged back at its prewar rate of $4.87 (for comparison, it is currently about $1.30). The effect was almost disastrous for many in British industry, especially those with strong exports. For example, in shipbuilding where unemployment was already at 30 per cent, more were laid off and in Barrow-in-Furness unemployment rose to 49 per cent.

This is what Boris Johnson wrote about Winston Churchill’s responsibility for taking the pound back on to the Gold Standard in his book, The Churchill Factor:

It is widely agreed that Churchill’s Chancellorship – whatever its merits – was blighted by wrongly ‘Going Back on Gold’ ... and at the wrong rate. Everyone now accepts that this was a catastrophic error. The value of sterling was pegged back at its pre-war rate of $4.87 – which meant the pound was overvalued, with fatal consequences for British industry. Exports became too expensive to compete on world markets.

Businesses tried to cut costs by laying off staff or cutting wages. There were strikes, unemployment, chaos – and then the crash of 1929, and still no escape from the punishing regime of the Gold Standard.

In the end the pound was forced off gold in 1931 by a series of speculative attacks on the foreign exchange markets – just as it was prised out of the ERM (Exchange Rate Mechanism) in 1992. Churchill carried the can for the whole disaster, and John Maynard Keynes wrote a denunciation called The Economic Consequences of Mr Churchill. It was indeed his decision, and as Chancellor, he cannot escape the blame. [...]

The trouble was that he was surrounded by a lot of clever people who thought they knew about economics; and they thought the Gold Standard was a frightfully good idea. The most ineffably self-confident of them all was the Governor of the Bank of England, the nattily dressed Montagu Norman. ‘I will make you the Golden Chancellor,’ he told Churchill. But Norman was not alone in his delusions.

The City was for it; the Labour Party was for it; Stanley Baldwin himself thought it would be easier just to get on and do it. In the end Churchill held a famous dinner party at Number 11 Downing Street, on 17 March 1925, and invited Keynes to come and put the contrary point of view. Alas, Keynes had a cold and was off form. Churchill the gold-o-sceptic found himself outnumbered, and reluctantly conceded.

The point is that he went back on gold in spite of his better judgement – and his judgement was better than that of a whole host of supposed financial experts. For those who remember recent British monetary history, he was in exactly the same position as Mrs Thatcher when she was bamboozled (by Nigel Lawson and Geoffrey Howe) into joining the disastrous European Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1989.

And Simon Schama in his A History of Britain agreed that the return to the Gold Standard was a disaster:

There was much trumpeting of the return of the great, solid, pound sterling and of the ‘shackling’ of the British economy to reality. But beyond the imperial fetishising of sterling, that reality as predicted by Henderson and Keynes, was shocking. The effect of a pound over-valued at $4.87 was to make the goods and services of the most labour-intensive industries even less competitive in export markets. Prices, and the number out of work, shot up; wages fell. In the worst-affected industries, like shipbuilding, unemployment was already approaching 30 per cent; in Barrow-in-Furness, indeed, it was a massive 49 per cent. The mine-owners’ response to the deepening crisis, made even worse by the fact that the German coalfields were back in production, was to demand wage cuts and extensions to working hours. The unions, on the other hand, asked for wage increases and discounted coal prices.

The General Strike

1926 was the year of the General Strike: an attempt by the major unions, with the miners in the van, to resist attempts by employers to cut their wages. As we have seen, the strength of sterling and the consequent problem of an overvalued currency was exacerbated in 1925 when the chancellor of the exchequer, Winston Churchill, took Britain back on to the Gold Standard which had prevailed throughout the nineteenth century and up to the First World War. In the 1920s, the pre-war era was seen as a golden age (there certainly was not the equivalent feeling in the late 1940s after the Second World War, when no one saw the 1930s as a golden age), and many thought that if only the conditions of that time could be created again, all would be well. These conditions included a £ valued at nearly $5 and not the $3.60 that prevailed in the first half of the 1920s. However, conditions had changed, and reverting to such an exchange rate merely made Britain’s competitive position even worse than it was already. For many employers the only answer was to cut wages. For many workers the only answer was to strike.

At the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries the working classes of a number of European countries, such as Belgium, Russia, Sweden and Germany, had organised general strikes. For example, Leon Trotsky, a key person in the Russian Revolution of 1917, wrote:

The general strike is one of the most acute forms of class war. It is one step from the general strike to armed insurrection ... If carried through to the end, the general strike brings the revolutionary class up against the task of organising a new state power ... A real victory for the general strike can only be found in the conquest of power by the proletariat.

In the mid-1920s, there had been a number of successful strikes throughout Britain such as the Clydeside general strike for a 40-hour week in 1919 and the strike by 300,000 Lancashire cotton workers for a 30 per cent wage increase, and in addition wages were reduced in the slowdown of 1923 and 1924. Perhaps as a result of these conditions, a call for a general strike received widespread support.

Coal mining was the largest and most important industry in Britain and its union, the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain (MFGB), was a major force in the trade union movement.

Coal production had declined sharply. Output per man had fallen to 199 tons in the early 1920s compared with 247 tons before the First World War and a peak of 310 tons in the 1880s. Mine owners were still keen to maintain their profits, and consequently put pressure on the miners by reducing their wages and increasing their hours. In the seven years up to 1926, miners’ pay went down from £6 a week to £3.90 (£360 to £234 in today’s money). King George V tried to calm things down and commented: ‘Try living on their wages before you judge them.’ The MFGB, saying: ‘Not a penny off the pay, not a minute on the day’, effectively led the trade union movement into a general strike.

This is what Roy Hattersley, a minister of the Labour government under Harold Wilson in the 1960s, wrote about the General Strike of 1926:

The world was changing but Britain was slow to adapt and accommodate the change. The old industries – steel, coal and shipbuilding – were beginning to die and their death was felt most painfully by the poor. It was the miners – always the shock troops of the trade union army – who fought the valiant, and most obviously doomed, rearguard actions against reality. The leaders of the TUC knew that a strike in support of the old rates of pay and hours of work could not be won. And the coal owners were determined to starve the workers into submission. But it was neither betrayal nor brutality which beat the Miners’ Federation. It was the passage of time.

Ramsay MacDonald, the leader of the Labour party, was against the General Strike from the start. But loyalty compelled him to give it his formal support. Solidarity with the working class is in fact not a virtue normally associated with MacDonald. He is condemned in Labour folklore as a traitor who deserted his party and led a ‘national’ government. But perhaps he was less a villain than a victim of the belief that only he could save the nation from financial disaster. Unhappily he had no idea how salvation could be achieved, and the authorities on economic survival feared to give him firm advice in case their prescription proved inadequate. He chose to do his duty as he saw it. This would ultimately require him to abandon both the party and the beliefs which had sustained him for 30 years.

Poverty was, of course, greatest in the areas where once the old industries had flourished. The middle class thrived, but families at the bottom of the income scale endured every sort of deprivation and, as the numerous marches to London discovered along the way, too few people cared. Among those that did were the churches. For the first time, the Church of England discovered its mission to urban Britain.

It was in housing that the Church’s campaign was most effective. In towns and cities from London to Leeds the Church of England drew the nation’s attention to the horror of life in the Victorian slums, and the government was stung into action. The encouragement of house building – in all its forms – was one of the few preoccupations for which the inter-war governments can take credit. It was about the only way in which the conditions in which the poor lived were improved.

As we have seen, the General Strike had many different causes, but the final trigger came in March 1926 when the Royal Commission set up by prime minister Stanley Baldwin to look into the mining industry reported, recommending wage reductions for the miners. The miners appealed to the general council of the TUC, which called for a general strike. This, the General Strike of 1926, lasted nine days. Despite bitter feelings, it was remarkably peaceful. Both sides were firm but well-disciplined, and there were few ugly incidents. Volunteers who manned buses, trains and other essential services were assaulted vocally rather than physically. Workers’ councils issued permits for essential supplies to be delivered. But the TUC leaders were divided. Some thought the strike might get out of hand, because extreme militants were gaining popularity. In the end, against the miners’ wishes, the TUC agreed to end the strike in exchange for somewhat vague government promises. Since the strike had been going well, there was a natural feeling of betrayal among many strikers. The trade union movement was weakened, a fact reinforced in 1927 when the triumphant government introduced a Trade Disputes Act making general strikes and ‘sympathetic’ strikes illegal, and attacking Labour party finance. Trade union members would in future ‘contract in’ to pay the political contribution, which went to the Labour party, instead of ‘contracting out’ of the otherwise automatic payment of their contributions.

Churchill was one of the more vociferous and militant anti-union members of the government, although subsequently he did cooperate with the minister of health, Neville Chamberlain, in introducing new social welfare measures. These included a new Pensions Act, and a Local Government Act which transferred the old Poor Law guardians’ work to local authorities. This Conservative government also extended state control in the generation of electricity; the Central Electricity Board was set up, and soon there was a national electricity grid. The conversion of the British Broadcasting Company to the state British Broadcasting Corporation was also a nationalising measure even though the old company’s managing director, Reith, stayed on.

Aftermath of the conflict

The miners remained on strike for some time but a continuing lack of money meant they needed to return to work and, by the end of November, most of them were indeed back down the mines. Others remained unemployed for years, while the ones who went back to work had to put up with longer hours, lower wages and local wage agreements. Those that had gone on strike became convinced they had achieved nothing at all.