The 1930s is widely dismissed as a rather dour, floundering period in British history. The Gordon Brown of twentieth century decades you might say. A decade bookended by The Great Depression and the Second World War, W H Auden judged it a ‘low, deceitful decade’ from a New York barstool in 1939. Juliet Gardiner, in her epic history, is here to make sure that we do not leave the thirties at that. She has painstakingly trawled local record offices for the unheard voices. The result is a recovery of the myriad experiences of the time and, as ever in history, a reappraisal of what we think we know,
She brings to light the hope and prosperity that could be found in varying sections of society. Beyond the hunger marches and employment, visible to the attentive eye is also the boom of suburban building, the deluge of new Baby Austin cars, a golden age of cinema and the advent of what we know today as ‘high street shopping’. Her arguments are brought to life by the details: a working class man hiding from the means-testing man in the pantry, the vicar’s wife reading trashy novels, the rain-soaked Silver Jubilee celebrations which infuriate British Communists, who point out that ‘the children need food not bunting’, the disgraced clergyman making a living walking on hot coals in Blackpool.
Juliet Gardiner acknowledges that it was difficult to avoid filling the pages with the impending doom of the Second World War. Given that we clearly know what the future had in store, I wondered how much contemporary anxiety there was. She explains that some strategists may have had an inkling in terms of foreign policy, but it took ordinary people far longer to believe that it was really possible that they were entering a second conflict. Despair for them was instead principally linked to intractable unemployment. However, despite these problems, Gardiner also identifies a strong thread of optimism. As she puts it, ‘People really did feel that there was a key to all this. It was a time of planning, think tanks, discussion groups’.
In our own, less ideologically driven, age it can be easy to forget how polarised and tribal politics used to be. Apart from the shock value of seeing the emergence of Oswald Mosely, there was much other grassroots activity, like the popular New Left Books through which people would subscribe to socialist literature and form book groups for discussion. As Gardiner explains, ‘the twentieth century was a long slow process of coming to terms with democracy’. I ask her what she found most surprising in her research. To her the idea that Ramsay McDonald, a Labour Prime Minister, refused to see hunger marchers was deeply shocking. Overall, she believes that the key to understanding the decade is seeing how static it all was. ‘People did sometimes move house, but not far. They went abroad, but rarely’. Individuals were ‘so very insular’.
There are not many aspects of the 1930s that one would perhaps want replicated in our own time, but they did have some wonderful vocabulary. So which words would Gardiner bring back into usage? ‘Wizard, ripping and stupendous!’ – three upbeat words from a decade that we should remember was not so unrelentingly gloomy after all. Even Gordon Brown smiled sometimes.
The Thirties: An Intimate History
By Juliet Gardiner (HarperPress, £30)
