This is only a start: Gardiner, undaunted covers all this and more: sport, cinema, art, architecture and design, pubs, men, women — even birth control. (Spermicidal jelly was named ‘Volpar’, for ‘Voluntary Parenthood.)
It would be easy to fill several pages with the gems that Gardiner has unearthed. She is a fine phrase-maker herself, with a gimlet eye for the sharpness of others. Edward VIII, she notes dryly, ‘had a lively, if transitory, sympathy for the unemployed’; after he visited south Wales and famously declared, ‘Something must be done’, she cites MP Robert Bernays: the King had said this, ‘knowing that he himself could not do it, would not bother to do it, and in any case had no ideas on how it could be done.’ While Beatrice Webb despaired after the Crash: ‘It certainly is a tragically comic situation that the financiers who have landed the British people in this gigantic muddle should decide who is to bear the burden.’
The run-up to war is outlined simply and clearly, with no recourse to virtuous hindsight. Gardiner presents, without comment, Christina Foyle’s response to the success of Gollancz’s Left Book Club with her own Right Book Club (slogan: ‘Might is Right’) and its Nazi-inclined selectors. At the Berlin Olympics the French gave the Nazi salute at the opening ceremony, and, chided the Daily Express: ‘It would not have done the British any harm if they had made [the same] gesture’. The Daily Mail cried ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts!’; while up to 230 MPs were thought to be sympathetic, believing there was ‘no fundamental difference between the Blackshirts and their parents, the Conservatives’.
The Thirties is a splendid overview, a detailed, absorbing read; it is astute yet non-judgmental, comprehensive yet not daunting. George Orwell described the year 1938 as ‘a scenic ride to catastrophe’. The same metaphor could describe the decade, and with Juliet Gardiner as our driver, readers could not be in safer hands in the tour of a lifetime.
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