Riding for a fall

Many attempts have been made to portray the ‘Roaring Twenties’, or the ‘Gilded Nineties’, or the something-or-other sometime-else, but in truth the 1930s is one of the few decades that fits neatly into a nice round summary, with the Great Depression at one end, the second world war at the other.

Many attempts have been made to portray the ‘Roaring Twenties’, or the ‘Gilded Nineties’, or the something-or-other sometime-else, but in truth the 1930s is one of the few decades that fits neatly into a nice round summary, with the Great Depression at one end, the second world war at the other. The 1920s had seen a sharp recovery from a war in which 30 per cent of all men aged 20–24 had died. The following 10 years was a decade of extremes, of hunger and despair, but also rising wages, falling prices and increased standards of living; a decade of political tension, the rise of fascism and a belief in modernity and improvement.

H. V. Morton, that indefatigable searcher-out of the ‘real’ England, admitted that ‘I devoted myself to … green fields and pretty things’, blithely ignoring those places that failed to amuse. Juliet Gardiner has no such squeamishness, and her opening sections, on the fallout of the worldwide economic slump, make sobering reading. Many south Wales mining districts ‘had the feeling of occupied territory’, but government response was slow and clumsy, leading one Labour MP to wonder, ‘was there any need to set up expensive investigating machinery to discover that the majority of the working class were very poor?’

The eight Hunger Marches, of which Jarrow was only the most famous, are vividly described. Gardiner lets everyone speak for themselves: the marchers, Ramsay MacDonald’s daughter (she recommended domestic service to the women marchers), and Herbert Samuel, who despaired as the marchers were refused permission to petition parliament: they were telling the starving, ‘If you are disorderly, we cannot listen to you … If you are orderly, we need not.’