British society between the wars

Martin Pugh takes the title of his account of Britain between 1918 and 1939 from a novel by Barbara Cartland, and this yoking together of romantic fiction with social history is in keeping with the surprising juxtapositions to come.

These 20 years, Pugh writes, “boast a coherent identity enjoyed by few periods in history”, and yet they invite curiously divergent readings. W H Auden (not, as Pugh writes, T S Eliot) called the Thirties “a low, dishonest decade”, while for Virginia Woolf the Great War “destroyed illusion and put truth in its place”.

The inter-war period blended high culture with low and economic depression with improvement. George Orwell described the age as “restless, cultureless… centring around tinned food, Picture Post, the radio and the combustion engine”, but it also saw the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses, the flowering of high Modernism, and the founding of Penguin Books in order to revive the classics.

Contradiction was the rule: Freud’s psychoanalysis rested alongside Arthur Conan Doyle’s spiritualism; the aristocracy was on the wane while the Royal Family was at the zenith of its popularity; women were shorn of their locks; liberated from their corsets and taking their first gasps of sexual and sartorial freedom at the same time as being reminded that their place was in the home.

Low production ran alongside high levels of consumption: jelly babies, Mars bars and Marks & Spencer were born, and these years of denial nurtured our current mania for shopping.

The early life of Barbara Cartland, the only figure mentioned who did dance all night, encapsulates some of the major themes of the period.

Her father died in the Great War, which ended when she was 18. Strapped for cash, she began a career as a journalist while throwing herself “into leisure and pleasure after the privations of wartime”. She delayed marriage and childbirth; she sued for divorce. Financial hardship coexisted with hedonism; she was the modern woman espousing conservative values.

Such is Pugh’s attention to the revolution taking place in women’s lives that he manages to realign the gender of a period which has tended to be dominated by men and “muscular” issues such as Modernism, socialism and fascism.

This was a feminine age, as can be seen by the flourishing of women’s magazines – by the 1930s there were 50 titles on sale, most focusing on the virtues of home and hearth. Good Housekeeping appeared in 1922, to be joined by Women and Home, My Home, and Wife and Home.

Challenging established narratives is what Martin Pugh does best. He describes a time not just of hunger marches, class conflict and mass unemployment, but of rising incomes, improved diets, holidays, motoring, aviation, leisure activities and suburban comforts. The prison population stood at 11,000 and unused jails were being closed down.

Another of the many myths he explodes is the one assumed by Virginia Nicholson in Singled Out: How Two Million Women Survived without Men after the First World War. “Interwar women,” Pugh shows, “by no means lacked husbands; despite contemporary fears, more of them got married than had before 1914, and by the 1930s the institution of marriage was reaching its heyday.”

In many ways what Pugh has done is to revise The Long Week-End, the snapshot of Britain between the wars written by Robert Graves and Alan Hodge and modestly described by them as “a reliable record of what took place, of a forgettable sort”.

It is the “forgettable” material used by Pugh as well – the newspaper headlines (“Butler driven mad by jealousy”), the crime figures (there was no inter-war “crime wave” it seems: the British were a law-abiding people), the court records – that tell the tale.

This ephemera reveals a great deal more about the times than the childhood memoirs by the likes of Paul Johnson and William Woodruff on which Pugh relies too heavily, as though they captured the spirit of the age.

Paul Johnson’s stories of encountering a strict librarian in a public reading room in Stoke, of crossing a road by himself, or of noticing that not many people had a bath, are less interesting or revealing than the remarkable texts produced in the Thirties such as Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth and George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier, about which we could hear more.

Where We Danced all Night succeeds is in bringing out both the strangeness and the familiarity of this odd period of history. Martin Pugh allows us to see a version of ourselves in the culture of the Twenties and Thirties in a way we simply cannot when we look at the elusive Edwardians, and this is what makes it so rewarding a study.