'Searching for the Gleam': Finding Solutions to the Political and Social Problems of 1930s Britain

It was Auden's 'low, dishonest decade' (expressed as he sat on a bar stool on the Lower East Side in New York), the devil's decade, the locust years, the dark valley, most recently Richard Overy has named it the morbid age.¹ Undoubtedly and for many years the Thirties has had a bad press. It was an era darkened by economic catastrophe, social despair and international prevarication and misjudgement.

Yet I found myself increasingly unable to find a single word or even a phrase that expressed how I had come to look at the decade - certainly none of those above fitted. Characterizing a period is always contestable since any decision leaves out so much of the argument. But books have to have titles. The working title for my recent book on the Thirties had been the 'restless years' and that title did fit, however unexceptional and unarresting, because among the most striking things about the 1930s in Britain is both how confused and misled a decade it was, but also how frequently reflective, and how strong was the impulse then to find out and to sort out.

As we all know Britain was a divided country in the 1930s. There was unprecedentedly high unemployment, that never dropped below two million between 1931 and 1935 and in the depth of the Depression during the bleak winter of 1932-3 reached almost three million. The safety net assumed to be in place since the Liberal welfare reforms of 1911 had sagged perilously. It had been knotted together to catch those affected by seasonal, short-term unemployment. And it failed when unemployment was long term and structural, and intractable particularly among unskilled young and older men. Unemployment - and its pernicious yet often overlooked bedfellow, underemployment, short-time working - was essentially regional, confined to the North (Tyneside, Teeside, Merseyside, the Scottish lowlands around the Clyde) and the Welsh mining valleys. There was also rural unemployment and poverty. Somerset was the poorest non-industrial county in Britain in the late 1930s and Cornwall was laid waste by the relocation of the tin industry and the failure of clay quarrying.

Britain's traditional heavy industries - iron, steel, coal-mining, shipbuilding, and textiles - had been in trouble since before the First World War when Britain was losing its hegemony as the workshop of the world and being overtaken by the more recently industrialized countries namely the US and Germany. However this had only become unavoidably apparent after the 1929 Wall Street Crash and the subsequent decline in world trade, by which time it was obvious that Britain's ills could no longer be put down to the dislocations and disruptions of the First World War, and the country needed to concentrate on developing a domestic market for its goods. And it was these areas of production - cars, light engineering, synthetic textiles, pharmaceuticals, house-building, largely located in the south-east and the Midlands - that were increasingly prosperous and belied the epithet the 'hungry thirties'. The growth of cheap imported food meant that prices were falling as wages were gradually rising, and since investors, their fingers burned in the Wall Street crash, were more likely to save and invest their money in Britain, an expansion of credit and low interest rates fuelled the dreams of many for a home of one's own, a new 'Tudorbethan' semi, along an arterial road or on a new estate where there were no streets since 'street' sounded harshly urban.² In suburbia thoroughfares were all crescents and avenues, walks and parades, and even a baby Austin in the garage was becoming the realizable dream for many in the lower-middle class and some in the skilled working-class. While at a painfully slow rate the worst inner-city slums were being demolished and gross overcrowding alleviated,³ families⁴ were rehoused in the vast new estates built by local authorities which were such a feature of the interwar years - for example Becontree near Dagenham in Essex (still Britain's largest housing...