I discovered this book during the research for my interwar reading list. My copy is a very attractive Folio Society edition that I bought from eBay for £15 back in February. Like so many eBay Folio books, it looks as-new and had probably not been read before. The lead author, Robert Graves, is most famous as one of the leading WWI poets. I read his excellent Goodbye to All That last year, his memoir of his time as an infantry officer in the trenches of the western front. He’s also well known for his historical novels about the Roman era, with I Claudius being the most famous. This book was written in 1940, just at the end of the period it covers. It’s quite surprising that with the country faced with the all-conquering Nazi war machine just across the channel that he had the mental discipline to focus on writing it. His co-author was a young Oxford post-graduate, Alan Hodge. It seems that Hodge had worked with Graves on several earlier books, and in the immediate pre-war era had even moved into a communal living arrangement with Graves and various others. Graves later married Hodge’s wife (after their divorce), with little ill feeling between them. Hodge lived in Lewes later in life, so there’s a nice local connection. It seems Hodge did most of the research and wrote the first draft, so we should probably consider this primarily a Hodge book with additional input from Graves.

The book opens with the recovery after the First World War. Graves says that British society was divided between those who had fought in the war, and those who hadn’t, and as one who had, his sympathies are obviously with the de-mobbed servicemen. He notes that many had difficulty settling back into civilian life, and that a common worry was of a violent Soviet style revolution if their demands were not met. However, it seems that the British working class was fundamentally conservative, and with the slow but steady increase in living standards throughout the period and considerable social mobility, there was never any real prospect of a threat to the establishment. The worst crisis was the 1926 general strike, but even then it was only the most extreme hot-heads who talked of overthrowing the elite; the objectives of the vast majority of strikers, and their union leaders, were simply better wages and conditions.

The status and roles of women had been fundamentally changed by the war, and the interwar period featured an ongoing struggle to get basic equality. Despite women now entering the workforce in greater numbers it was usual for them to be paid far less than their male colleagues. It was also the era when contraception became commonplace. This was championed by Marie Stopes, whose book, Married Love, was the first to talk frankly about contraception and sexual health. While I’d heard of Stopes I had no idea that she was married to Humphrey Verdon Roe, the founder of the Avro aero company - famous for the WWII bomber. Graves also discusses homosexuality and claims that it was common among the aristocracy and upper middle class, but unknown amongst the working class. It’s a claim I find hard to believe. Surely it just wasn’t as acceptable, so working class homosexuals had to be far more circumspect. He also talks about the rise of lesbianism, which wasn’t technically illegal. He describes the fall in religious observance, with much hand-wringing at the time over the incursion of leisure activities on traditional Sunday observance.

The interwar period was also the time when today’s line-up of national newspaper titles emerged, with the Times, Telegraph, Guardian, Daily Mail, and Daily Express. The period also witnessed the birth of radio and the creation of the BBC. For the first time the entire country listened to the same news reports and the same entertainment. It must have had a huge cultural impact. The original cinemas and film industry pre-dated WWI, but it was during the interwar period that Hollywood became ubiquitous and almost the entire population regularly enjoyed the movies. It was the spearhead of a massive infusion of US culture into the UK, which also included jazz and dancing.

The interwar period is often characterised as the “roaring twenties” followed by the dismal thirties, a time of depression and unemployment. What this book shows is that for a sizable section of society, perhaps the majority, it was actually a period of almost uninterrupted improvement. For the first time the working-class had leisure time and disposable income. Much to the shock and disappointment of the middle and upper classes the working-class didn’t become middle class in their tastes with increasing income, but simply working-class with more money. The leisure industries that grew up to satisfy those tastes: the cinema, the dance hall, the vibrant bustling seaside resorts, were not to establishment tastes. One can see this in the hand-wringing discourse about the Americanisation and “dumbing down” of English culture. The effects of the rising living standards on domestic architecture were also sneered at by many intellectuals, especially the growth of the London suburbs with their detached villas that JB Priestley so derides in English Journey. Priestley, a man of conservative Victorian tastes was also shocked by much of the art of the period, especially the surrealists, which he described as “the deepening twilight of barbarism.”

Graves has lots to say about art and literature, obviously his comfort zone. The Bloomsbury set get a mention. Lots on Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh, DH Lawrence, and James Joyce. Interestingly he talks rather disparagingly about his own book in the third person. It’s as if he realises he has to mention Goodbye to All That if he’s also talking about Sassoon, but he’s embarrassed to blow his own trumpet. He also describes how American evangelicals were frequent visitors to the UK, including the woman preacher and her “angels” from Waugh’s Vile Bodies. I had no idea Waugh had based his character on a real person. There is an interesting discussion about the decline of poetry and the rise of the novel, especially after the introduction of cheap Penguin paperbacks in the late 30s. Poetry has never been popular in my lifetime, so it’s hard for me to appreciate how important it was pre-WWII.

Graves and Hodge are to a large extent rigorously non-partisan in their description of the slide towards war during the later thirties, although at one point Graves does describe a visit he paid to Winston Churchill to urge him to push for increased re-armament. Interesting given that Graves is considered an anti-war poet. They describe, rather than condemn, the left’s flirtation with Soviet Russia and the widespread pacifist movement, and similarly are not particularly hard on Chamberlain, despite his policy of appeasement having been proved fundamentally misguided by 1940.

This book was a fascinating and entertaining overview of the period, very easy to read and full of interesting asides. At times it came across as rather jumbled, as if Graves and Hodge didn’t want to leave anything out, but couldn’t quite weave a cohesive narrative around it all. It reads very much like contemporary journalism, which to a large extent it was, especially when discussing the fashions and events of the late thirties. It’s a great corrective to the view that the thirties were unremittingly grim. Compared to our comfortable early 21st century lives they undoubtedly were, but from the perspective of 1940, they must have seemed an enjoyable “long weekend” between two grim world wars. The book reinforces my view that much of the modern world, and certainly the world I knew growing up, had emerged during the interwar period. In 1920, England still looked very Victorian, but by 1939 people were living in suburbs with electricity, running water, a car on the driveway, talking to their friends on the telephone, listening to the radio, going to work in offices, and enjoying the cinema at the weekend. Things weren’t much different in the 1970s. Of course, to paraphrase William Gibson, that standard of living was not as well distributed as it was in the 1970s, and you wouldn’t have had to look very hard to find Victorian heavy industry surrounded by poverty-stricken slums, as well as country houses with full staffs of domestic servants, but for a large proportion of the country life did change significantly for the better. One wonders what England would have looked like in 1950 without WWII? Would the 60s have come fifteen years earlier? Or would the Victorian vestiges of heavy industry, empire, and inequality have persisted for far longer? We can never know.