Depression and dictators

For Professor Overy Britain between the two world wars was, as his title proclaims, a morbid age. There was a general view among intellectuals that civilisation — itself a creation of intellectuals — was in crisis, and society in danger of collapse. There was an ‘institutionalised pessimism’ that became ‘an overriding intellectual fashion’ that spread throughout society as a whole.

Overy examines the elements of this general crisis: the death of capitalism, the decline of rationalism, the possibility of annihilation in a world war, the advance of political extremism in the form of Oswald Mosley’s fascists and communist revolutionaries. While most of Europe was governed by an assortment of authoritarian dictators, Britain remained a parliamentary democracy, an open society given to discussion. There were weekend conferences on such subjects as the merits of nudism and of Esperanto as a universal language. In 1938 the Left Book Club had 50,000 members and it was calculated that 200,000 read its monthly key book.

The most evident manifestation of this general crisis in Britain was that capitalism, which had made Britain a great industrial power, was on its last legs, incapable of creating prosperity as the Victorians conceived it would. The financial collapse of 1929 had deepened into a depression which, at its height, threw three million men out of work. Compared with the present credit crunch, with a few shops boarded up, the depression of the 1930s was visible to all. As a boy I saw the unemployed standing idly on the street corners of the great industrial towns. Their cloth caps were a uniform that divided them, as did their local accents, from the respectable citizens who wore hats.

In 1933 a lad from depressed Lancashire, Walter Greenwood, who had left school at 13, published a novel, Love on the Dole, which described the destruction of a working-class family by grim poverty.