1. What were the new popular entertainments in the 20-s?

2. What famous people of the time can you name?

In 1920 Paul Whiteman, the American 'King of Jazz', brought his orchestra to Britain. Technical advances on pre-war inventions helped the spread of this new music: portable gramophones and the improving quality of recording established it as the all-pervasive sound of the twenties, forerunner of the transistor radios and cassette players of the seventies. Watered down from its vigorous origins in the streets and pleasure houses of New Orleans, it became the dance music of hotels and village halls, pier pavilions, theatres, and the frantic parties of the 'bright young things'.

For all classes the most potent entertainment medium of the time was the cinema, from Babylonian edifices complete with Wurlitzer organs to little Gems, Electric Palaces, Mayfairs and Regents in the remotest market towns. Douglas Fairbanks and Rudolph Valentino were the great heart-throbs; Laurel and Hardy, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd and the London-born Charles Chaplin the laughter-makers. In 1927 the movies became talkies: many stars, owing more to their looks than their diction, did not survive the transition; but new stars were born, and while the newsreels grew ever grimmer throughout the thirties, feature films grew more lavish and tuneful.

Army surplus trucks were converted into buses, linking villages to their market towns. Entertainment became more varied, with cinema shows, and people became more mobile in search of it. Road haulage became a speedy affair, and competition made the distribution of goods, notably farm and dairy produce, less expensive. Pressure was soon put on local and national authorities to improve the roads. The main highways were as they had been in the days of Telford and Macadam; the side roads were variable in the extreme. Railways were still the backbone of transport, but branch lines were already beginning to close. And across the land, the supremacy of the work-horse diminished rapidly.

Other technical advances opened up new possibilities for the more active. There had been motor racing before the war, but now the fever spread. Setting and breaking speed records became the rage. Henry Segrave and Malcolm Campbell, both knighted in due course, pushed up speeds on land and water. At Daytona beach in Florida, Segrave reached 203 mph in March 1927, to be beaten by Campbell's 206 mph the following February. Segrave attained 232 mph in 1929, but was killed in 1930 when his speedboat overturned on Lake Windermere. Campbell continued setting new records until in 1935 he achieved 301 mph over a measured mile. After the Second World War his son Donald was to follow the same star until, like Segrave, tragically killed in a speedboat crash.

In the air, John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown made the first direct flight across the Atlantic in a Vickers Vimy aeroplane in June 1919, taking sixteen hours twenty-seven minutes. That same year a British airship, the R34, made a double crossing. Ross Smith flew from London to Australia in 135 hours.

In 1926 Alan Cobham tested the possibilities of long-distance air routes between Croydon and Cape Town, and between England and Australia, and was knighted. He commanded an expedition round Africa by flying-boat and, having studied refuelling problems at stop-overs on long journeys, experimented with refuelling in the air.

Private companies which had started regular passenger and freight services as soon as the war ended found operating costs and com­pliance with international regulations expensive, and in 1924 joined forces to become, with a government subsidy, Imperial Airways. This operated mainly long-distance flights, while British Airways ran services to and from the Continent. The two amalgamated in 1939 as BOAC — British Overseas Airways Corporation. (Internal and Continental services were hived off again in 1946 as BEA — British European Airways, only to be amalgamated yet again in I974.)

In 1913 Jacques Schneider, a French flying enthusiast, had instituted the Schneider Trophy for an annual seaplane race. Suspended during the war, contests began again in 1920. Three successive wins, culminating in Flight-Lieutenant Stainforth's 379-mph average in 1931, brought the trophy permanently to Britain.

There were not just more machines in the air, but more voices. So many amateurs were buying wireless parts and assembling sets to listen in to any sort of message which might be floating about in the ether that manufacturers decided to establish a British Broadcasting Company to transmit regular programmes. They appointed a Mr John Reith as manager. He regarded his job as not so much a profession as a vocation, and vowed to offer every household 'all that was best in every department of human knowledge, endeavour and achieve­ment'. The manufacturers, aiming to entertain the public and so sell more wireless sets, found themselves with a Calvinist missionary on their hands.

In 1925 a governmental committee set up to consider the pros and cons of this monopoly recommended its continuance but in a revised form. Late in 1926 the company was reborn as the British Broad­casting Corporation, financed by licence fees from the owners of receivers. Mr Reith, later Sir John and ultimately Lord Reith, was given the title of director-general. Under his jurisdiction, jazz seeped through only in the diluted form provided by tasteful dance bands, regional accents were subdued by BBC English, invisible announcers had to don dinner-jackets and black ties before reading the evening news bulletins, ad-libbing of any kind was forbidden, and the slightest misdemeanour by members of staff meant dismissal: no one involved in a divorce suit, even as an innocent party, could remain on the payroll.

Performers, politicians and many of the public grew to resent Reith's dictatorship. At the same time they had to admire him. The fact that he survived 1926 spoke well for his staying power: for that was the year when the independence of the BBC was at stake, threatened not merely by commercial interests but also by political interference.

The General Strike

Task27. Find the following information:

1. Who initiated the strike?

2. What was the role of the mass media in this situation?

3. What is TUC and what was its role?

4. How did people live (for example in Scotland)?

5. What caused the rise of Scottish nationalism?

The prime minister from 1924 to 1929 was Stanley Baldwin, a lover of the quiet life at home and abroad. 'Wake me up when that's finished,' he used to say when foreign affairs were being discussed, and in domestic affairs he liked to steer an equable course down the middle of the road. Nevertheless, when the economic crisis worsened and the mine-owners called for longer working hours and lower wages, Baldwin added his voice to theirs: 'All the workers of this country have got to take reductions in wages to help put industry on its feet.'

For some time the Labour movement as a whole had been murmuring about a general strike. Its aims were a bit uncertain — somehow, simultaneously, to liberate the country from the capitalist system, raise wages, shorten hours, and bring about a new brotherhood of man. When negotiations between the Government, mine-owners and miners broke down, it seemed that the moment had come. 'Not a penny off the pay, not a second on the day', became the miners' slogan, and they asked the General Council of the Trades Union Congress to organise a national strike.

Plans were drawn up by a committee including the powerful Ernest Bevin of the dockers' union and Transport Workers' Federation. Builders, printers, transport workers and those in heavy industry were called out in support of the miners in May 1926, restrictions were imposed on gas and electricity supplies, and other trades were held in 'second line' reserve.

Forewarned, the Government had time to set up its own emergency measures. Trains and lorries with essential supplies were driven by volunteers, often accompanied by police guards. Special constables were recruited. Winston Churchill, who had left the Liberals and rejoined the Conservatives, to become chancellor of the Exchequer, advocated a display of troops and tanks in the major cities. He was overruled, and turned his energies to running an official news-sheet, the British Gazette, to which the strikers responded with the British Worker.

Churchill also urged that the BBC should be commandeered and used as Government spokesman, but the prime minister agreed with Reith that it should remain impartial. Reith interpreted this impartiality according to his own conscience, and there were complaints of bias towards the relaying of Government statements and appeals for volunteers, with little time given to TUC statements. When the archbishop of Canterbury wished to broadcast an appeal for a compromise, Reith refused. But the corporation did scrupulously ban all editorial comment from its bulletins, and at no time permitted any purely propagandist material against the strikers.

After nine days the TUC realised the governmental organisation was better than its own, and called off the strike. The miners refused to surrender and continued on their own until August, when they had to admit defeat. They returned to work with longer hours and lower wages.

The next year a Trades Disputes Act made general strikes illegal, and remained on the statute book until 1946. (Burke)

Despite the Housing Act of 1924, passed by the second Labour government and sponsored by the Clydeside MP John Wheatley, the standard of most Scottish housing was poor and often deplorable. New houses of only two rooms, or even one room – the notorious 'single-ends' - were still being built to house whole families. The typical Scottish town had always been a close-packed one, with relatively tall tenement-style dwellings even in smaller centres. Social and economic factors combined to make Scottish housing among the most squalid and consequently disease-ridden of Europe. The urban air was unhealthy – the coal fires of the domestic stove and of industry polluted the atmosphere and coated every building in soot. (It would be a satisfying visual shock later in the century when the many colours of Glasgow's and Edinburgh's cleaned-up stonework were again revealed.) James Maxton, a schoolteacher before he became a Glasgow MP, noted that in one class of sixty children, thirty-six could not stand up straight because of rickets. Tuberculosis, then incurable, was a scourge in these tight-packed and insanitary dwellings, made worse by the damp and cold that prevailed for much of the year. Without benefit of bullets or bayonets, Asian flu swept silently through the country in the immediate postwar years and took more victims than the war machine had done, mostly from the old and the under-nourished.

In the first years of Labour government, individual Scottish Labour members presented Home Rule Bills to parliament on several occasions, only to be dismissed by a combination of unionist opposition and indifference within their own party. In 1928, the Scottish National Party was formed. Its founders had come to realise that none of the 'British' parties was ever likely to do anything serious about devolution, and that the answer could only lie within Scotland itself. Nationalism as then displayed in Italy and Germany was not an encouraging spectacle. Semi-independent Ireland was locked in a bitter civil war. In a party with one single over-riding motive, there were inevitably many different points of view about the political nature of an independent Scotland. Although the ethos of the party emerged largely from the Independent Labour Party, right-wing, even fascist sentiments were expressed by some members. Four decades of ineffectual argument, internal dis­putes, breakaways, and public indifference were to follow, though the party never disappeared. In 1946 it was to produce a comprehensive 'Statement of Aim and Policy', and under the steady, unglamorous leadership of Dr Robert McIntyre and William Wolfe, it gradually built itself up from local bases, and with concentration on local issues, into an effective national political force.

Great Depression in the United Kingdom

Task 3. Answer the questions:

1. What were the causes of the Great Slump?

2. How were various regions of Britain affected by the slump?

3. How did the Great Depression influence the political life of the country?

4. Who was the leader of a fascist party in the UK?

The Great Depression of 1929-36 also known in the UK as The Great Slump broke out at a time when Britain was still far from having recovered from the effects of the First World War more than a decade earlier. A major cause of financial instability, which preceded and accompanied the Great Depression, was the debt which many European countries had accumulated to pay for their involvement in the war. This debt destabilised many European economies as they tried to rebuild during the 1920s.Britain had largely avoided this trap by financing her war effort largely through sales of foreign assets. The resulting loss of foreign earnings left the British economy more dependent upon exports, and more vulnerable to any downturn in world markets. But the war had permanently eroded Britain's trading position in world markets through disruptions to trade and losses of shipping. Overseas customers for British produce had been lost, especially in traditional industries such as textiles, steel and coal mining. The 1920s saw the development of new industries such as the motor industry and the electrical industry, but British products in these fields were not usually sufficiently advanced to compete in world markets against foreign competitors possessing more up-to-date plants, and so British products largely served the domestic market. The traditional industries which formed the bedrock of Britain's export trade (such as coalmining, shipbuilding and steel) were heavily concentrated in certain areas of Britain, such as the north of England, south Wales and central Scotland, while the newer industries were heavily concentrated in southern and central England.

In May 1929 a minority Labour government headed by Ramsay MacDonald came to office with Liberal support. This was only the second time a Labour government had been in office (they had briefly been in office in 1924), and few of the government's members had any deep knowledge of economics or experience of running the economy. MacDonald's Labour Party was not radical in economic thinking, and was wedded to the orthodoxy of Victorian classical economics, with its emphasis on maintaining a balanced budget at any cost.

In October 1929 the Stock Market Crash in New York heralded the Great Depression. The ensuing American economic collapse caused a tsunami effect across the world. World trade contracted, prices fell and governments faced financial crisis as the supply of American credit dried up. Many countries adopted an emergency response to the crisis by erecting trade barriers and tariffs, which worsened the crisis by further hindering global trade.

The effects on the industrial areas of Britain were immediate and devastating, as demand for British products collapsed. By the end of 1930 unemployment had more than doubled from 1 million to 2.5 million (20% of the insured workforce), and exports had fallen in value by 50%. Government revenues contracted as national income fell, while the cost of assisting the jobless rose. The industrial areas were hardest hit, along with the coal mining districts. London and the southeast were relatively less hurt. In 1933, 30% of Glaswegians were unemployed due to severe decline in the heavy industry.

Under pressure from its Liberal allies as well as the Conservative opposition, the Labour government appointed a committee to review the state of public finances. The May Report of July 1931 urged public-sector wage cuts and large cuts in public spending (notably in payments to the unemployed) to avoid incurring a budget deficit.

This proposal proved deeply unpopular within the Labour Party and among its main supporters, the trade unions, which along with several government ministers refused to support any such measures. The Chancellor of the Exchequer insisted that the Report's recommendations must be adopted.

In a memorandum in January 1930, one junior government minister, Oswald Mosley, proposed that the government should take control of banking and exports, as well as increase pensions to boost purchasing power. When his ideas were turned down, he resigned. He soon left Labour to form the New Party, and later the British Union of Fascists.

The dispute over spending and wage cuts split the Labour government: as it turned out, beyond recovery. And the resulting political deadlock caused investors to take fright, and a flight of capital and gold further destabilised the economy. In response, MacDonald, on the urging of King George V, decided to form a "National Government" with the Conservatives and the Liberals. On August 24 MacDonald submitted the resignation of his ministers and led his senior colleagues in forming a "National Government", with the other parties. MacDonald and his supporters were expelled from the Labour Party and adopted the label "National Labour". The Labour Party and some Liberals, led by David Lloyd George, went into opposition. Although MacDonald continued as Prime Minister until 1935, after the 1931 election the national government was Conservative dominated.

The new national government, with the Conservative Neville Chamberlain as Chancellor, immediately instituted a draconian round of public spending and wage cuts. Public sector wages and unemployment pay were cut by 10%, and income tax was raised from 22.5% to 25%. But these measures merely reduced purchasing power in the economy, and worsened the situation, and by the end of 1931 unemployment had reached 3 million. (www.answers.com/topic/great-depression-in-the-united-kingdom)

The Depression Years in Scotland

The ironworks, brickworks, shipyards, textile factories and coal-mines that laboured to help the war effort had stood quiet only a few years before. The depression following the Wall Street crash of 1929 sorely afflicted Scotland and unemployment ran as high as 30% of the working population. In single-industry towns, this could mean something closer to 80%. This (with the exception of the scything down of so many of the young male population in 1914-1918) was the worst decade of the twentieth century for Scotland, beginning in financial instability and turning rapidly into industrial depression. There was no evidence of competent management from a 'national' government whose Prime Minister, in the early part of the decade, was a Scot himself, Ramsay Macdonald. Those who looked abroad to Europe saw only trouble. Even emigration, the answer so often before, had little to offer since the lands of opportunity were themselves in slump.

The crisis in the capital markets did not result in a Marxian revolt of the workers. Scotland was essentially a country of the working class, though the land-workers were less likely than industrial workers to see themselves in proletarian terms. Despite the apparent inability of government or the managerial class to improve matters, there were no great outbreaks of violent discontent. One or two Communist MPs were elected. The Labour Party had no cures to offer, drastic or otherwise. But even in 1932, when 27.7% of the working population were unemployed, 72.3% remained in work. They had something to hold on to. For the rest, apart from their dole, if they qualified for it, and charitable handouts, there was a strong national tradition of grim endurance, with a special word to express it - they had to thole it, and hope for better things to come. The third novel in Lewis Grassic Gibbon's Scots Quair trilogy, Grey Granite, gives a graphic portrayal of the period, set in a city with features of both Aberdeen and Dundee.

There were elements of progress. House-building programmes undertaken by local councils both provided work and an improved housing stock, with minimum standards of space and quality established by law. Modern light industries, the basis of the hi-tech and communications revolution to come later, were being set up in some places, but not on the same scale as in England and North Wales. The technical competence and inventiveness that had characterised the country for a hundred and fifty years did not disappear. A Scot, John Logie Baird, had been first to demonstrate television (in 1929) though his system was not chosen by the BBC in 1936. Another Scot, Sir Robert Watson-Watt, was leading work on the early stages of radar. But as a result of the Depression, Scotland entered the Second World War with a base of heavy industry that was inefficient and obsolescent. Much of it had not been modernised since before the First World War. (D. Ross)

Part 4. Britain before and during World War II

Edward VIII (1936)

Task 28. Find out the following:

1. What was Edward VIII like?

2. Why was he never crowned?

3. Why did he abdicate?

4. What were his political views?

In his eldest son, Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David, King George V seemed to have the ideal successor. The Prince, who was 'David' to his family, was handsome, charming and refreshingly modern in his outlook; yet he also seemed genuinely concerned with the social problems of postwar Britain. As Prince of Wales, David was an unqualified success; as King Edward VIII he was to be a near-disaster.

He was born on 23 June 1894 at White Lodge in Richmond Park, and spent much of his childhood at his parents' favourite home, York Cottage, in the grounds of Sandringham. He had a strict upbringing; his father was a disciplinarian, and his mother Queen Mary, did not express her feelings easily. In 1907 the prince began his naval training at Osborne, and he then moved on to Dartmouth, but the death of his grandfather in 1910 temporarily interrupted his Dartmouth studies. He was now the heir to the throne, and in July 1911 he was invested as Prince of Wales in Caernarvon Castle.

After two years at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he enjoyed the sports and social life but achieved little academically, the Prince went into the Grenadier Guards on the outbreak of World War I. A lack of physical courage was never one of his faults; he was desperately keen to be allowed to serve at the Front, and resented being restricted to staff appointments, even though these took him to France, Suez and the Italian front.

In peacetime, the Prince still found himself subjected to restraints, not least where dangerous activities were concerned; he took up the breakneck sport of steeplechasing but was pressured into giving it up by his father, and his interest in flying was also discouraged. However, he was kept busy with a full programme of royal duties. An official visit to Canada in HMS Renown, in the company of his friend and second cousin Lord Louis Mountbatten, was highly successful, and tours to Australia, New Zealand and India followed. But the country where he felt most at home was the United States of America. The luxurious yet informal American way of life, and the warmth of the people, appealed to him as they had to his grandfather Edward VII, and after his second visit, in 1924, it was noticed that he had even adopted Americanisms in his speech. The gulf between the Prince and his more conventional father and brothers was widening.

The King made no secret of his disapproval of his son's circle of friends, who were mostly sophisticated and fun-loving. The Prince liked nightclubs, such as the fashionable Embassy, in Old Bond Street: he liked smart clothes, and set a few fashions of his own, notably for Prince of Wales checks, and ties with the new 'Windsor knot'; he liked elegant, mature women, and his affairs with Lady Furness and Mrs Freda Dudley Ward were no secret in London society. Unfortunately for the future of the House of Windsor, the Prince of Wales seemed only interested in women with previous marriages; suitable young girls did not attract him.

The Prince's preferred retreat was the 18th-century Fort Belvedere, near Sunningdale in Berkshire, which his father gave him in 1930. Looking somewhat like a miniature mock-castle outside but luxuriously modernised inside, the Fort, as he called it, was the setting for some of the Prince's happiest hours. There he could relax with gardening and golf; there he could enjoy his friends' company in privacy; and there, from 1931 onwards, he frequently entertained the woman whom he had come to adore – Mrs Wallis Warfield Simpson.

Mrs Simpson, a chic, charming, twice-married American in her mid-thirties, was already becoming estranged from her second husband when she entered the Prince's life. Ernest Simpson, an American who had taken British nationality, proved complaisant about his wife's affair with the heir to the throne, but others, as the Prince knew, would not be. For a time it was kept out of the British press, though foreign newspapers discussed it excitedly, printing photographs of the couple together whenever possible: gradually, however, the British public came to hear of it. By 1934 the Prince was determined to marry Mrs Simpson, divorcee or not, and once he had become King, in 1936, the issue almost provoked a constitutional crisis.

The new King continued to receive glowing publicity for visiting the unemployed of South Wales, and for his evident concern in the state of the poor in the depressed areas. But his passion for Mrs Simpson was distracting him from his duties; behind the ever-charming, popular facade, the selfish and headstrong side of the King's character was causing alarm to the Prime Minister and the Cabinet. Though an American queen might have been welcome, a woman with two husbands living could not be the consort of the Head of the English Church. In November, the King told his Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, that if he could not marry her, he was ‘prepared to go’. By 4 December the newspapers were talking of abdication; on 10 December the king announced to Parliament that he had that morning signed an Instrument of Abdication; on the morning of December 11 it was passed by Parliament. An Independent MP's proposed amendment that the monarchy should be done away with altogether was massively defeated.

That evening the former King broadcast to the nation. explaining his reasons for quitting public affairs, with the historic phrase, 'I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility…without the help and support of the woman I love'. His brother the Duke of York now became King George VI: as such he created the former Edward VIII Duke of Windsor. To the former king's anger, the title of 'Royal Highness' was not granted to his wife, though he insisted that it should be used at all times, despite the ban.

On 3 June 1937 the Duke of Windsor and Mrs Simpson were married in France. They made their home for most of their lives in France, with regular trips abroad. One of these, to Berlin, in 1937, included a meeting with Hitler, which added to disquieting speculation that the Duke's politics were far too favourable to the Nazi ideology. After war broke out, in 1939, he was anxious to serve his native country, and was appointed Governor of the Bahamas.

The rest of the former king's life became a somewhat purposeless round of golf, travel and entertaining, and he never fulfilled the promise of his golden youth. During his last illness, in 1972, his niece, Queen Elizabeth II, demonstrated the continuing family ties by visiting him in France. For his funeral the Duchess of Windsor came over to England, and stayed as a guest in Buckingham Palace, where she might have presided as Queen. In death, the Duke was reunited with his royal forbears; he lies by Queen Victoria's mausoleum at Frogmore. (J.Ross)

George VI (1936-52)

Task 29. Answer the following questions: