William Tyler
1920’s: Old Class Divisions Resurface: Flappers and General Strikes

William Tyler - 1920s Old Class Divisions Resurface, Flappers and General Strikes

- Welcome, everyone, to this second of the three talks I’m doing about the interwar years in Britain, and today being the second, we’re up to the 1920s. And I’ve called this talk, and I’m sure you all read what was sent out by Lockdown. I called this talk Old Class Divisions Resurfaced, Flappers and General Strikes, and that will become clear, for those of you who don’t get the connection, I hope it will become clear as I talk. If, as the Victorians were apt to say, “The poor are always with us,” you could equally say of Britain that class divisions are always with us, and the officers in the trenches of the First World War were shocked by the illiteracy of so many of the men that served under them and how ignorant many of those men were of the whole wide variety and, of issues. And the story is told, and not a fictional story, but a factual story of men recruited in the northern city of Manchester were being taken by train to the southern coast to embark on ships to be taken to the mainland of Europe to join the fight. But they stopped in the Midland city of Birmingham and had to transfer trains. When they heard the local residents talking in a very distinctive accent, some of them actually thought that they had already reached France. So ignorant were they of the geography, that you had to cross water to reach France, and so ignorant to their own country that they didn’t recognise their own language with a different accent. It shows how narrow so many of their lives were up until that point.

There was a feeling arising on both sides of the division, the class division at the end of war, that things must now change, who were illiterate and could not write or read. So there was a big emphasis upon education, but there was more than that. There was a feeling that things had to change. Now added to this change that had come over people who fought in war was the spectre of the Russian revolution of 1917 hanging like some Sword of Damocles over British society. Politically, the Labour Party was seen to be on the rise, and in the 1922 general election, they replaced the Liberal Party as the official opposition to the conservative government. And two years later, in 1924 of the first, and it was a minority government that supported by the liberals, the first labour government was formed in 1924. I mentioned that last week. I mention it again this week, and I’ll come back to it before I finish this talk. It is a momentous moment in time which ensured that British political life would go on pretty well unaltered since the 19th century with two political parties jostling for power, and both committed democratically, really, to centralist policies. By 1922, ‘24, the former wartime Prime Minister Lloyd George’s phrase that he would create a country fit for heroes to live in was ringing very hollow indeed. As we saw last week, those of you who were listening, many of the middle and upper classes fear, genuinely fear a revolution, a communist revolution, but they misjudged the British working class.

Most of the British working class did not want a red Marxist revolution. What they wanted was an improvement in their own living standards. We know, with hindsight, the revolution never came. Although as we saw last week, many felt that, in the social and industrial unrest of 1919, revolution might well have been triggered. It wasn’t. It never was. I began with two aphorisms, but let me add a third. The one certainty of both life and history is change. Nothing stands still for very long, and in the aftermath of victory in 1918, change was distinctly in the air, making up for the artificial pause in life caused by the war. Before the war, the aspic liberal government had been a radical, reforming government, and although the liberals were not to take power again, nevertheless, the haunting message of that pre-war liberal government haunts both the Labour Party and the Conservative Party, and in a sense, creates the agenda for many of the working class as well as some of the middle classes, change is necessary. It isn’t a change that comes from nowhere. It’s a change based upon the direction this country was going in prior to 1914. When I thought about how to talk about 1920s, I have to say, it’s not an easy decade to talk about. If any of you listening are history teachers or historians of one sort or another, I challenge you to talk about it. It’s quite tricky, whether it’s about Britain, America, France, or wherever you are talking, it’s not an easy decade. 1930s is easy because we know what happens at the end of it, but the 1920s is quite difficult.

So I thought what I will do is I’ll try and identify some of these changes that were taking place, so that you have a sense that things were moving forward as they did for those who lived during the 1920s. In 1914, for example, Britain had just 132,000 cars on its roads. In 1926, 8 years after the war had ended, Britain had 778,000 cars on the road, and by the end of the decade, in 1930, it had over a million cars. Now, although that they were not owned by the working class to any extent at all, they nevertheless were a sign of the future. I’m talking about change, and they still believed in the Victorian idea of change. A change was progress. Some of us feel, today that some change is not progress, but regress. That’s another talk for another day. They believed in progress, and they saw this as progress. And indeed, within 30 or 40 years, we are to become, as the rest of Western society became, a car owning society. In 1920, the BBC broadcast its first radio programme. That makes you sort of sit up and think, what’s a change for radio mean? Everyone now can hear the news, for example. Now, I’m using for this a book that I put on the book list last week. I’ve added to that book list this week. So all the books I’m mentioning today are either on one or other of those lists, and other things that I’ve used come from those books. This is the book “Our History of the 20th Century.”

It’s pieces from journals and letters, so it’s original, first hand accounts of the 1920s. You can find the full blurb about the book on the blog. First of all then, about the BBC, and I read this, and this was from a diarist called Lionel Curtis who was writing to his friend at the end of August, 1920. And he talks about this new invention of the radio, an invention which is going to have far reaching political effects. It’s called the amplifier, which was a name for radio at the time, was amplifier. But interesting that he saw that it would have political significance, in the same way that, today, we’re learning that the internet has political significance. We might immediately think of the radio as an entertainment. Indeed, that was one of the tasks of the BBC, but we forget, and it is important, that people began, as I said a moment ago, to listen to the news. As a child, in late 1940s, early 1950s, before we had television and we had radio, whatever they were doing, the family would turn on the BBC News at nine o'clock, and if I was still up, it was “Be quiet and listen.” And one o'clock on a Sunday, we sat down to lunch. At one o'clock, they turned the radio on for the one o'clock news. So we were well informed, as indeed, where the Western world had become well informed. This was very different from the men who went to war and died in the trenches in 1914.

This is a changing world. I have one more illustration about radio, if I may. This is Thomas Hardy, the writer, and he’s writing at Christmas 1925, “New Year’s Eve,” he says. “New Year’s Eve, F and I sat up, heard on the wireless,” no longer called the amplifier, the wireless, “Heard on the wireless various features of New Year’s Eve in London, dancing at the Albert Hall, Big Ben striking 12, singing 'Auld Lang Syne’,” “God Save the Queen,” sorry, “God Save the King.” I still can’t get my head around that. “‘God Save the King, the Marseillaise.” What on earth are the Marseillaise? I do not know. And hurrahing, they said. So what Thomas Hardy is here showing is that radio had this facility of bringing the nation together. So whoever you were, in your humble rural cottage, you could listen to the New Year being welcomed in in London. You could listen to the concert in the Albert Hall. The Squire will be listening in the Grand House. You will be listening in your cottage. You are listening, both of you, to the same thing. It is a pulling of the nation together, whether the nation realised it or not. The coming of radio had an enormous effect on society. Shopping also changed. We now have more and more retail shopping. The phrase retail therapy wasn’t used, but in some ways, retail therapy did come in, at least for the middle classes. I remember being taken to lunch as a young adult educator by a lady in an organisation called the Preschool Pay Groups Association with which I was working. And I was taken to lunch in a department store in Birmingham, as it happens, called Rackhams. I had a very nice lunch, which she paid for, I’m pleased to say.

But she said, of course, this is where I always come, because this is where we used to come before the war when they did ladies lunches, and they did. But now, it’s broadening out and sad, one of the sadnesses in my life I can no longer go into town and go to Woolworths. How lucky you are, where you live, if you’ve still got Woolworths. I loved Woolworths as a child, right through to an adult. You could get whatever you wanted in Woolworths, it seems to me. But oh, did you know, by the way, about Woolworths? America, maybe there’s an American ex-GI listening. American GIs used to go into the Woolworths lunch bars. You sat on a big stool for sandwiches and things, and the Americans used to go into there to get their sandwiches at lunchtime, but when they went in, they were already young British ladies showing a little more leg than perhaps was desirable at the time to attract the American GIs who came in for their, oh, do tell me if you’re an American GI. You can even tell me if you were a British woman that lifted your skirt just a little bit to entice the American soldiers. But Woolworths was centric. By 1930, there were 400 branches of Woolworths across Britain. Now we have none. I keep Woolworths writing paper somewhere in my office, just to remind myself about Woolworths. But there were other places, other than Woolworths, there were all sorts of these retail chains that were opening up. There were chains of fish shops. In Britain, people remember Mac Fisheries. There were chains of grocers. People remember Lipton’s, and there were all sorts of chains of shops that were opening up, which were open to all classes.

Who you would meet in Woolworths? Goodness, and maybe even a GI, but you can meet anybody in these shops. So that was a major change. Eating out became, well, more popular, and Lyons Corner Houses reached down into a bigger base of people who ate in Lyons Corner Houses after the war, but perhaps greater than radio, greater even than the wonderful Woolworths, the great leveller in society was the cinema. Before television, the cinema, changing their programmes twice a week. So a young man could take one young lady to the cinema on a Tuesday and a quite different young lady to the cinema on a Saturday. Cinemas were a place to meet people, in terms of, if anyone wants to let me know afterwards that they met their other half in the darkened cinema, do tell me, and of course, some cinemas had double seating at the back. We won’t go too far down there. The cinema also gave birth to the modern concept of, maybe the word is celebrity, or maybe the word is star, but it’s somewhere amongst that sort of language that we first meet Charlie Chaplin, who was the first big, major, immediate post-war star. When he travelled here to Britain, where he was born, brought up, sadly, in a workhouse here in Britain, when people in their droves came to see him, then the cinema really took off, and it really took off when talkies came in.

Talkies, you could hear people speak. You could hear the songs. And British society becomes heavily influenced, at that point by American society, American slang. And in a strange way, the cinema linked our two societies between Britain and America in a very decisive way. Indeed, in the modern era, so do organisations like Netflix link, and Amazon Prime link Britain and America, a common language derived from film, derived from television programmes, derived from internet, derived from internet programmes. This is Fred Bason writing. 1928. “Tonight, I went to the Piccadilly Theatre, just off Piccadilly Circus, and I saw 'The Jazz Singer,’ which is a talking film. As you see the man singing, you hear the man singing. If it wasn’t that the noise sort of blares forth like 20 gramophones at once or six strong voices singing at once, it would be a miracle.” Isn’t that the complaint of those of us who are slightly longer in the tooth? If we go to the cinema today, we find the noise, the levels to be higher than we can cope with. I often actually take my hearing aids out if I go to the cinema, to be honest. But there’s complaining about that at the very beginning. “I suppose it is a miracle. I had front row.” Well, I would never take front row in the cinema today. “I had front row, and I got a bad headache to looking up at the screen. If this had been a real, live show, my seat would’ve been best in the house.”

As it was talking cinema, it was worst in the cinema. Interesting. “Still, I ought not to say nothing because Edgar Wallace of all people gave me this ticket. He said, perhaps you can use this, ever so calm he said it. When I saw what this was, I was flabbergasted with joy. All the stars were there. I got 11 autographs, plus an ache in my neck and a real sickening headache. Al Johnson is ‘The Jazz Singer.’ I don’t like him. He sings awful.” Well, this is Britain. No one is ever far from being critical in Britain. If, we are, I think, the most depressing race in the world for being critical of things. However marvellous something is, there’s always something to criticise. But we wouldn’t be British if we just enjoyed everything. For the young middle and upper classes, music and dancing changed, with a vengeance. Black Bottom, to Charleston, all those fantastic things. And jazz, of course, which we just mentioned, much to the disgust of older generations, but older generations have always, always disapproved of the clothing of the young, of the music choices of the young, the dancing of the young, the morality of the young, as such as the change in families, in generations, nothing changes.

Some of these hedonistic young men and women who wanted to forget the war and indulge in this new 1920s age were described as bright young things. I’d like to interject a thought here. I’ve mentioned Charlie Chaplin, and now I’ve mentioned bright young things. If you were doing a university course with me, an MA or whatever, I think my challenging essay for you would be this. Did the cult of the young in our society and the cult of celebrity actually begin in the 1920s? And it doesn’t matter whether you’re listening in Canada, America, Britain, or wherever, it, the, it, the same argument applies. Is this the beginning of the youth culture which explodes in the 1960s? Is this the beginning of the celebrity status, which takes off once the cinema has talking pictures? I think perhaps, it is. But you can make cases for people before this. In Britain, you could make case for the cricketer, WG Grace, for example, or Tree, the great actor. Yeah, you can do that, but not in the scale that was now happening in the ‘20s. I just leave that as a thought. One of the phrases used to describe the '20s, and particularly young women in the '20s, was it was the age of a flapper. The flapper. The flapper was defined really as a woman intent on, I’d say, “Is your daughter out again?” Said the crusty old man. “Oh,” you might answer, “I think she’s enjoying herself.” “Enjoying herself? Well, I saw her flouting herself.” Conventional standards were being overturned, not just by young men, but by young women.

Now of course, we know, and we had a look at that in the previous course we did when we talked about the rise of feminism, if you like, or the role of women in pre-1913 society, late Victorian Edwardian society. Yes, it’s true, but now, it has a further kick on. For example, women, as well as men, now take up cigarette smoking. Shock. Horror. If you want to be terribly upper class and upper middle class, you would have a cigarette holder that you would, I worked in a college in the north of England, and the principal was a very odd, strange man, and I was a new head of department in my 20s, and another head of department was a much older person than me, in her 50s. And Cynthia was, she used one of these cigarette holders, and to annoy the principal, she would puff on it and put the ash on his carpet. She was a remark, I loved her. She was wonderful and, but it’s the only person I’ve ever known that would always use, and I, to this day, I don’t know whether she did it just to annoy him, but she was always doing that at heads of departments meetings. Smoking becomes, more middle class women went to work. There’s always this silly business about women went to work after the war. Working class women, just look at the words, working class women, working.

They were working in horrendous conditions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And we, I talked about that on previous occasions, but now there is a difference. Middle class women had done their turn, as it were, to help the war effort, and there was no turning the clock back. And in 1920, the first women were allowed to qualify as lawyers, and the first women were allowed to qualify as accountants. So they’re moving into the professional classes. This is middle class women moving into work, and that, of course, gives them a greater say in the household. Working class women often had, the main set, the man often handed over his wage packet to his wife on a Saturday lunchtime and got spending money from her in return, and she tended to make all the decisions. But in middle class homes, the man’s word ruled. That now is challenged. If your wife is a solicitor earning considerable sum of money, maybe nearly equal your own, women were still paid less than men, but nearly equal your own, then you can hardly dominate, because the woman will spend then her own money. She might not, well, it’s possible, if she had a brother or a father to open her own bank account. Things are changing. Fashion was freer. Hair, women’s hair became shorter, with the skirts also became shorter.

Divorce became easier. The Matrimonial Causes Act of 1923 allowed women to take the husband to court for divorce on the same grounds that a husband could take his wife to court. There was an equality over divorce by 1923. Now, you might say, oh, well, that’s hardly strange. It is very strange, in terms of the 1920s. This is a hundred years ago, and things were very, in terms of women’s rights, were barbaric in comparison to today. We saw that some women had the vote in the election at the end of the war. All women, all that, is to say, women had the vote on equal terms with men by 1928. And if you say, well, that’s great, but so what? Well, French women didn’t get the vote until 1944. 1928. So things for women were a-changing, as they say. Things for men were changing. Things for the working class were changing. Society was, indeed, changing. That is why I think you can talk about the modern world in the West beginning, whichever society you live in today, as beginning at the end of the First World War, the period between the beginning of the century and the beginning of the First World War is really like an appendix to the 19th century, in whichever country. But now, in the 1920s, this is a new world. On the other hand, Britain is always . We remain eccentric, and we remain snobby. Let’s face it, and I choose to say this, because I’ve got two nice little stories to show you. This is Mrs. Dudeney in a diary that she kept in the Sussex town of Lewes, which isn’t very far from where I’m sitting. She writes in 1919, “There has been a town meeting over some memorial to Lewes soldiers who have fallen in the war. One idiot has suggested an obelisk with a underneath it.”

I think that’s wonderful. You can’t get more eccentric than that. But this, and apologies to all my American listeners, but I hope you see the funny side. I hope you see the funny side of this. I just think this is so, so extraordinary. This is Arnold Bennett, the fiction writer, writing in February, 1926, “As I passed across the end of the hotel lounge tonight, the noise of the American accent,” this is, of course, in London, “The noise of the American accent everywhere.” Well, these are American tourists in 1926. “As I passed across the end of the hotel lounge tonight, the noise of the American accent everywhere was simply awful. The American tourist will overrun Europe like the goth soon. It is positively frightening.” I love it. And so apologies to all the Americans, but you can come in and do some lovely anti-English stories and anti-British stories. I had, I was watching some silly programme on the television, which I found fun. It was an American sort of comedy, drama, detective story, but there was a wonderful anti-Canadian line in it that made me laugh out loud. But I’m not going to do that. I’m not getting involved between Americans and Canadians. I can get involved as a Briton with Americans or with Canadian, but I’m not getting involved in American, Canadian argument.

But it was a, I just thought it was a very hilarious joke, but I must move on. My notes say, pause. Well, I have paused. I’ve talked about change. I could have talked about lots of other sorts of changes as well, if you like, but I chose to just illustrate some of the changes and to emphasise some that seem, to me, to be more important than others. But I now want to read you a editorial piece from the book, “Our History of the 20th Century.” And the editorial piece is really just to link the first half of the talk with the second half of the talk, which I will come to in just a moment. “Despite greater prosperity in certain quarters, both politically and economically, this was a volatile epoch characterised by high levels of unemployment, inflation, wage stagnation, and industrial unrest.” And again, that’s something I think you can look at in your own societies and say, how true is that? “Despite greater prosperity in certain quarters, both politically and economically, this was a volatile epoch characterised by high levels of unemployment, inflation, wage stagnation, industrial unrest, culminating in the hunger marches and the general strike of 1926.” Now, you all appreciate that, in an hour, I can only open windows for you. You can read a lot more if you are so minded. And the books I put on my book list, if you use the bibliographies in those as well, or you look up books that you are interested in or even subjects you’re interested in on Amazon, it will come up with a load of things. I’m not going to talk about hunger strikes, but they’re easy to find books, they’re easy to find historical articles in journals and so on. I’m going to talk about the 1926 general strike.

When it came, and it had been building up during the '20s, there had been strikes during the '20s, hunger marches, there was a sense of, there was a sense of, how do I put it really? There was a sense of frustration really amongst the working class that things weren’t improving quick enough. This is not revolution. They’re not using Marxist language. They’re not calling to murder people. They are just saying, we should have better conditions at work. We should have better pay. There should be better chances of employment. We need that. We need a better standard of living. The journalist and television personality, Andrew Marr in his book on modern Britain has simply written, “The general strike is not a revolution.” The general strike is not a revolution. Yes, it wasn’t. But many historians have written PhDs on whether it might have been, whether it could have led to revolution. I think it wouldn’t. And I think it’s the same reason that we didn’t, in 1919, have revolution or in the 1930s. There’s lots of reasons. One of the main reasons is the Labour Party had come to power in 1924 and shown, in the phrase of the period, that it was fit to govern. And so working class people thought, all we need to do is to have a second labour government and things will change. And with a labour government, the Conservative Party ameliorated its own policies, so that it didn’t appear totally out of touch with the policies of the Labour Party. In other words, politicians are striving towards the centre ground. And that suited the British. The centre ground suited us.

We were not, we’re not good material for revolutions and bloodshed on the streets. That’s one important reason. And the other reason is that things were gradually improving and the middle classes, as a group in society, were expanding in number and opportunities were opening up, not least in education. Remember, the first labour Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, had been born out of wedlock. He was a bastard that didn’t know his father. He was brought up in the most humble of circumstances. And if he could become Prime Minister, then the argument is, this is very, very unlike, for example, the situation in the States in the 1920s. But here, there was a feeling that we should sort this out without revolution. This is a book, again on my new book list, it’s called “The People: the Rise and Fall of the Working Class, 1910 to 2010.” It’s by a lady called Selina Todd. It is, it isn’t a sort of book to read for fun in bed at night. Well, not unless you want to be driven to sleep very quickly. It might do that. It’s quite dense, but it is nevertheless brilliant in what it says. And this is a paragraph, I think it’s really epic here. “The strike, the general strike in 1926, was really a desperate cry for manhood, wrote Winifred Foley.” Winifred Foley’s father was a miner in the forest of Dean in between South Wales and England. She herself came to write about her, later in life, about her childhood and became quite a famous author in that sense.

“The strike was really a desperate cry for manhood, said Winifred Foley. Her father and his workmates wanted, she wrote, to be able to do a full week’s work in the pit, the coal pit, to be paid enough to fill the bellies of their families without fear of unemployment.” Now that doesn’t sound like Lenin. It just sounds like a desperate plea from the heart. I want to be employed for a full week. I want to be paid a decent wage so I can feed my family. And then she’ll go on and say, “Without fear of unemployment.” Let me read on. Selina Todd writes, “The strike was a battle for economic citizenship, for the acknowledgement that those who laboured were contributing to the country’s wealth and thus deserved their share in it. This was a staggering demonstration of working class resolve.” Yes, it was, but it was not revolution. They want a fair deal. Selina writes of the opening day of the strike, and it’s some, reads like this. “On the morning of the 4th of May, 1926, 22 year old Harry Watson left his home in East London and walked to the docks where he worked as a labourer. But this was no ordinary working day. When Harry arrived, the crowds and many joined weren’t milling around, hoping to be given a few hours work, the usual sight that greeted visitors to the docks, but holding a rally. Britain’s general strike had begun. That morning, as he listened to his workmates’ speeches, Harry became convinced that, quote, ‘We are going to win this one, because it’s a national strike. And the older men know what kind of power and authority that exercises.’ There was no question that there will be capitulation. There was no question that there will be capitulation by the government.” They were out to win.

The key union was the National Union of Mine Workers. And the key problem was the mines and mine workers. The mines were, at this stage, of course, in the private sector, and the private sector owners and managers wanted to cut the pay of miners and increase their hours, so as their profits would remain at current levels. Now, there were many issues around the problem. For one, the easiest coal had now been taken out of the ground, and so it took longer to take the remaining coal out of the ground. Thus, the yield per week or per month was far lower than it had been before the war. Secondly, Germany was allowed to pay part of its reparations, war reparations to France, not in cash, but in coal. And that cut off France, who was a leading importer of British coal. There’s lots of other reasons as well, but those are basically the two dominant economic reasons. So they, owners of the mines are trying to cut pay and lengthen hours. This unrest in the coal fields have been going on for some time. And indeed, in July, 1925, the government said that they would subsidise the industry. This was a conservative government. They would subsidise the mining industry for the next nine months. In other words, pay the owners money, so that the workers’ wages were topped up. Now, this was a sticking plaster approach, and it was never going to work. And of course, the sticking plaster came off in May, 1926, when a million miners were locked out of their mines by the owners.

A lockout. The government now made a major mistake in judging the public mood. If any of you take high office in whatever country you are living in, please don’t miscalculate public mood, because this will do for you very quickly indeed. Now, the government prepared a statement, and it read like this. “A general strike is not an industrial dispute. It is a revolutionary move, which can only succeed by destroying the government and subverting the rights and liberties of the people.” Nonsense. They totally misunderstood. This is about the cost of living, about feeding your families, about the security of employment. It’s nothing to do with revolution. They were sat in their offices in White Hall, blind to the realities of the situation. The print unions refused to print this in the press, and the government were facing serious problems. I would’ve loved to have been a fly on the wall at Buckingham Palace when George V, the King, met with the conservative Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, because we know that George V has been, was recorded as saying, this is the king. “Try living on their wages before you judge them.” Now, particularly for Americans who may have a different view of the monarchy than I do as a Briton and a monarchist, the monarchy is useful because it is above politics. And here is the king, not the brightest button in the box, I accept that, but saying something extraordinarily sensible. How can you behave like this when they don’t even have enough money to live on? I find George V always an interesting man. He’s often portrayed as stupid.

He was certainly not stupid, and not being in touch, he was totally in touch with what ordinary people felt in the way that the government wasn’t. There’s a, you can take the story, let me just interpose a thought. You can look at the modern monarchy of the present King Charles III as emerging from that of George V. That’s another essay, for those you want to write me 5,000 word essays, that’s another one to write. After a week of escalating clashes from the 4th of May to the 11th of May, clashes between police and workers, threats to call out the army, the publication headed by Churchill of a British Gazette to replace the newspapers that weren’t printing, legal action against the unions. In the end, the Trade Union Congress calls off the strike. They’ve made their point. They’re not about overthrowing the government. They’re about making the government understand. Eventually, even the miners were forced back to work. And Fiona MacDonald, in her book written in the 1920s, which is again another book which is on my last list, but she writes this, “Eventually, even the most hardened miners had to return to work. They were so impoverished that many of the families were suffering desperately.” There was no money coming in. “Some of the men were not reemployed and could not get work elsewhere. The coal industry ended up booming. There were far fewer workers with a much greater productivity level per worker, too bad for the poor, downtrodden workers.” Now, you can spin it in all sorts of ways. You can say that the workers lost the general strike.

In one sense, they did, but in another sense, they didn’t, because there’s a growing awareness that their case, as the king saw, was the right case. And you’ll see changes as we go into the 1930s which recognise that. And of course, although we have unemployment levels high, there are ways in which people come together to deal with that. All the Americans are shouting New Deal, New Deal, Roosevelt’s approach, which of course is true. But other countries also faced the problem in a realistic way. And I will come to that. I’m all right for time. I, there’s something I want do at the end, and I need time to do it. But I think I’m all right. This, I’ve written, this strange decade. I said, I thought it might be difficult to teach the 1920s, and I certainly have. And I find the 1920s difficult. The strange decade ended with a second labour government in power. The first had lasted a brief moment of time between January and October, 1924. In 1929, the second labour government, again led by Ramsay MacDonald, comes to power. You say, well, did the first labour government do anything? Well, I mentioned earlier in the talk, they did one thing. They showed that the labour government was fit for purpose, fit for government. And that was an important thing to show. They’re not going to overturn the state. They’re going, and they’re going to be competent in running the country. They only introduced, and it’s a short period of time, one piece of legislation which was important. Lloyd George had promised houses, and they hadn’t been forthcoming. But in 1924, the labour government introduced what is called the Wheatley, after the man wrote it, the Wheatley Act, and the Wheatley Act allowed central government to make subsidies available to local government to build homes, council houses.

So there is a start on a housing policy in 1924. And that gave people hope, even if a limited number of houses, even if the labour government lost power in October, 1924. Why did the labour government fail? Well, the conservative government had failed to get its act together in the end of 1923. By the end of 1924, the conservative government has got its internal affairs in order, quieted its internal critics, and is ready for power. And the liberals got worried about the direction that the labour government might go in, and they got frightened and withdrew from this unofficial coalition with labour. But what finally brought them down was by, was the threat, I don’t think threat’s the right word, the fear that communism would come to Britain. And in particular, there was a letter published in “The Daily Mail.” It’s called the Zinoviev Letter. Zinoviev was the head of Russian commenter, the Communist International. He was responsible for communist parties across the world. And he asked all the communist parties to prepare for imminent, imminent revolution. “The Daily Mail” printed this during the election campaign and said, this is what will happen if you reelect the labour government. We now know that the letter was a total forgery, but it didn’t help labour. So the conservatives come back in 1924, but are out again in 1929. It’s the British punch and duty show of politics, liberal, conservative, conservative, labour, conservative, labour, conservative, labour, what we’ve gone through from 1924 to the present day with one or two oddities of coalitions and national governments.

Perhaps people thought on the 1st of January, 1930, that we’d got through the worst of the post-war era, and we can move forward into the new decade with hope of faster and greater advances. But the shadow of that first war remained. The shadow of that first war remains in Britain to this day. But it certainly remained by the end of the 1920s. In November, 1927, 11th November, the day that the war ended, Armistice Day, a lady called Florence Harvey, Thomas Harvey’s wife, wrote this. “Armistice Day. My husband came downstairs from the study and listened to the broadcasting of the service from Canterbury Cathedral. We stood for the two minute silence. He said afterwards that he’d been thinking of Frank George, his cousin, who was killed at Lille.” The memories never went. And the memories still have not gone. But people became very isolationist. We can use the term isolationism in a very distinct way when talking about the United States in 1920s and ‘30s. But we can use it also in a limited sense in terms of the British population who remained isolated and not interested in what might be happening elsewhere, and in particular, blinded by what might be happening in Germany. As we lived still in the shadow of the First World War, so did the emerging shadow of the Third Reich appear. In 1930, at the federal election in Germany, the Nazis won 107 seats and were the second largest party in the Reichstag.

Few here took notice. One who did was Winston Churchill. And he’d been taking notice for some years now, over the rise of Hitler and Nazism. We all know that Hitler came to power finally in 1933. And in 1933, a very strange and complex man called Karl Kraus, who was an Austrian Jew, a polemicist and satirist, wrote a book. He wrote a book, and I’ve got a copy here. And again, it’s on the . It’s called “The Third Walpurgis Night.” The book was written in 1933. He died in 1936, before the Anschluss, and the book wasn’t actually published until 1952. He was, as I said, an extraordinary man. If you want to know a little bit about him, just simply look him up on the internet and look at his biography. He’s a strange man, but he was a very famous man, and people expected him, and very clever, and people expected him, in 1933, to say something about Hitler. They were waiting for him, in the German speaking world, to say something. He was the guru, if you like. He’d always been critical. He’d, well, they thought he would now say something, and he didn’t. But he wrote a book. And the book isn’t published until 1952. That’s nearly 20 years later. But in this book, he looks towards a future Germany. He’s writing in 1933, first year Hitler comes to power. But he’s looking further ahead than that. He’s looking down the years, years he will never see, because he died in 1936. He called it Walpurgis night. And the third Walpurgis night, the first was named after Saint Walpurga to ward off devils.

It was a night of fireworks and fires from the very northern European to get rid of devils. He said the second night was Walpurgas night, and the third was the election of Hitler as chancellor of Germany. And to finish, I’m sure lots of you know Karl Kraus, lots of you have read this book. If you haven’t, you might like to put it on your reading list. It’s on my blog. And the opening paragraph, it’s not easy, this. I’m sorry, I don’t wish to be patronising, but you got to key into this. I’ll try and read it with as much emphasis and sense as I can manage. “As to Hitler, I have nothing to say. I’m aware that, as the upshot of extended reflection, of repeated efforts to grasp this phenomenon, and the forces driving it, this falls far short of expectations.” In other words, people are expecting him to have written about Hitler, and he hasn’t. He says, “Onto Hitler, I have nothing to say.” But of course, he does, because the whole novel is the horror of Nazism, which he didn’t know, but he can, he looks into the future to see it. “They were, after all, pitched higher than ever before at a polemicist who is popularly but mistakenly expected to take a stand.” Hey, look, you all expect me to say something, but I’m not going to say it. “And who, when confronted by any evil that appeals to his temperament, has indeed been prepared to stick his neck out.” Yes, I have stuck my neck out in the past, but not now, he says, and why? “But there are evils which not only make the neck cease to be a metaphor, but may also prevent the associated activity of the brain from formulating a single idea.”

In other words, Hitler and Nazism is so dreadful I can’t get my head around it. I still feel, “I feel stunned. And since, before this actually occurs, I don’t want to give the impression of having been stuck dumb. I still feel compelled to give an account of this failure, to explain the dilemma into which such a complete upheaval in the German speaking world’s as punishment.” I don’t understand what’s going on, but I’m going to have to write about it. And he chooses to write this satire. “The paralysis caused by the awakening of the nation and the establishment of a dictatorship that now controls everything, apart from language.” Apart from language. “As to Hitler, I have nothing to say.” In six years, seven, if you take 1940 when Churchill becomes Prime Minister, Churchill has a lot to say. But Churchill has been saying it throughout the '30s. We have survived the war, 1914-18, some progress is being made. At least we haven’t fallen apart or into political chaos. We are still relatively strong as a people. We are still relatively struck, relatively strong economically, in the 1920s. And we can look hopefully to the 1930s. So have another little drink. Come and join me in a dance. And let’s forget what we heard on the BBC News last night. What does it matter to us that the Nazis are the second largest party in Germany in 1929? Or even that Herr Hitler is chancellor in 1930? What has anything to do with us? Of course, we won’t go to war again. No one would be as stupid as to do that. Have another dance, another glass. But we know different, a difference which we’ll see in the last of these three talks same time next week. But I may have some questions to answer.

Q&A and Comments:

Q: Now, this is Carol, Carol Ann, I’m sorry. In the very early days of radio, it seems that even the poor could afford one. Were they very cheap from early on?

A: Well, you could make your own. That’s the point. My dad made his own. Thank you. That’s nice.

Sound keeps freezing. It didn’t freeze with me, Gene. It, somebody else had sound. I have no, connectivity. Now, I do know that there was a problem with connectivity at the Lockdown end, not at my end.

Q: What was the impact of the Spanish flu?

A: I’m not sure how to answer the impact of it. People moved on from it, as they, as we’ve moved on from COVID and don’t think about it. I’m not sure what, I’m not sure I can that in answer other way, Damien.

Myrna says, Woolworths in Toronto was great. Richard says, Woolworths not wolves. I, sorry, I’m being thick. I don’t get that reference. If you thought I said wolves, I said Woollies, which is what we say in Britain, or used to say. I didn’t say wolves. Wolves to me is a football team.

Thank you, Ronda. Yes, sadly, you’re quite right. But of course, Woolworths started in America. You, the Woolworths family, American, the US had Woolworths, but we called it Five and Dime, exactly the same.

And somebody said, Peter says, whose British, Peter says, Woolworths was called the and Sixpence Store, same thing.

Marilyn says, my mother used to sing a song about Woolworths. There’s nothing over sixpence in the store. Mark, my memory of Woolworths as a adolescent in the 1960s in Spartanburg, USA, was walking through the store and seeing a row of African Americans sitting at the lunch counter bar stools surrounded by a host of city police and sheriffs. I was totally unaware of the history I was walking past of the civil rights movement in the American South. Apparently, Woolworths was the centre of much change over many decades in both our countries. That I did not know.

Mark, that is, that’s an interesting piece of history to share. And I’m grateful for you.

Carol, we watched a historic sit-in on TV from Canada. A historic sit-in? I’m not sure what sit-in you are referring to. I’m, I think I’m being very thick this evening.

Oh, Val says, Lyons Corner House and having a nickle bottle, glory as a child. What a treat. Thanks for the memory. Yeah, lots of British people are still, the waitresses were always called nippies, because they nipped around so quickly, and on their uniforms, they had, instead of it being white or whatever, the cotton was, they had red cotton. I had a PA who had been a nippy and she, she was something else.

Michael. Hello, Michael. My father told me, when Al Johnson sang “Sonny Boy” in “The Jazz Singer,” virtually a whole audience was in floods of tears. Oh, that’s a nice memory, Michael, to share. Oh, thanks very much. That’s a great memory.

Q: Why were they called flappers?

A: Because they flapped in the dancing basically, and very short dresses, which revealed a lot, says Sarah. Yeah, we won’t, yeah, quite. And also, well, no, I was going to say something about petticoats, but I’ll leave that.

Q: Did women teachers have to retire when they married? Did teachers, not teachers, women teachers have to?

A: Yes, absolutely. And in the Second World War, they had to be given special permission to bring, they had to bring married ex-teachers, women, let me start again. In World War II, they had to bring ex-teachers who were women back to teach, because there were not enough men to teach.

Oh, yes. Hannah, you’ve said what I’ve said. Lyons Corner House waitress wore nippies. They had the best bread rolls. We used to go to go regularly. I remember my father eating so many bread rolls 'cause they were so delicious. Don’t forget the fruit tarts were very special. I love these memories.

Q: How did the various economic ups and downs in the '20s affect the changes?

A: That’s a good question. I didn’t say anything today about that, because it’s more impactful in the 1930s. And I’ll say something about it in the 1930s, but I’ll refer, excuse me, but I’ll refer back to the 1920s. The 1930s were the years, here in Britain, where, well, and in the States. In America, there were more unemployed by the time America came into the war than when Roosevelt began his policies, of the New Deal. And here also, we had massive unemployment. So in both cases, you can say that the war dealt with the unemployment issue. Not only men at the front, women who have to take their jobs, but also, and particularly in the States, the armament industry. But I’ll deal with, I didn’t want to deal with the economic issues today. You have to make choices, as I say. I will deal with them next week.

Monty, about the introduction radio, I think the BBC was designed to entertain, inform, and educate. Absolutely right. I always think of that when I listen to you and the rest of the Lockdown faculty. Well, entertain, inform, and educate. Well, I hope I entertain. I try to inform, and I would be absolutely mortified if you felt I wasn’t educating you. CBC in Canada was the same.

Absolutely, Carol. It’s the same story. The story of the modern world doesn’t change. It, if you take the English speaking countries, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, America, or whatever, yeah, South Africa, then the, South Africa is a bit different. But take New Zealand, Australia, Canada, America, and Britain, then the stories are very parallel. Of course, the stories are parallel in France as well, but our stories are much more parallel. And they are linked by language. But interestingly, the whole point of Karl Kraus’ work on Walpurgis night is that he believed that language was the last defence against Nazism. Now, we can argue about that, but language is important. “1984” tells us that, George Orwell’s “1984.” Because we speak the same language, I think that helped.

Linda says, “You made me smile. In the ‘50s and '60s in Rhodesia, every day we sat down at lunch at 1:15 and had to be silent to listen the BBC News, and I still have the theme tune running in my head.” Now, that’s my point. You see? You were sat in Rhodesia. I was sat in Bristol, in England, and we were sat at the same time being told how to behave in the same way and hearing the same news. It’s incredible. And now, of course, with television, we can have, I mean, please share the American Canadian joke, says Cheryl from Toronto.

Well, it’s in a programme which is set in, the story is of a operative in American secret service who is betrayed by his own side and goes to live abroad. He goes to live in the Philippines, and he runs a shack shop, a gift shop on the beach. But he’s trying to run away from being a detective. But the local detectives are always employing him. It’s a comedy. And it’s very, I think very funny, and I’m trying to think, it’s, “Almost Paradise” is what it’s called. It’s an American production. Now, in the story, he is being asked, this American has been asked to act as a bodyguard for a visitor. And the visitor’s been targeted. And although he takes down some of them, he’s left with one man who actually puts a gun to the head of the person he’s meant to be guarding. And he said, “Well, I knew they wouldn’t shoot.” And she said, “Well, how could you possibly know they wouldn’t shoot? They’ve got a gun to my head.” “Oh,” he said, “They’re Canadian.” Well, there you are. I thought it was funny.

Oh, thank you, Marlene. Oh, right, yeah. Okay. The pictures are good. I don’t know what happened to your sound. It may have been the problem at Lockdown itself. I’m not sure. Don’t ask me about the technicalities of how this does, and I don’t know why I lost my picture.

Vivian, you can’t write that. My wife will get so angry. She said, you look perfect as always, when I couldn’t find the picture. My wife will say, my God, Miriam, you need to see a, you need to see an optician pretty quickly.

Betty, I, yeah. I’ve got time. Betty, William, our wonderful American history professor in Florida, we are Canadian, asked his class, how do you get 100 Canadians out of the swimming pool in a hurry? He’ll say, please. The Americans cannot usually cope with Canadian politeness, all of us quietly standing obediently in queues without pushing and shouting. That’s wonderful. I have to say, if you come to London and you haven’t been for a few years, the British idea of queuing quietly is no longer the case. I find it really dispiriting at a bus stop. I queue nicely, and people just barge straight in front of you. We, yeah, well, there’s a whole problem about the decline of civility in the modern world.

Q: Oh, now, Ted, how did the rise of the working class, changes in morality, and the demographics of the workforce contribute to the Great Depression?

A: That’s what I’m going to talk about next week. Incidentally, in terms of morality, in terms of Christian churchgoing, it declined significantly after the end of the First World War, on the grounds that people said, well, if God could allow this, well, how can we believe in a loving God? That’s the argument.

Q: Shelly, if both the French and Russian revolution were started by the middle class who felt they did not have enough political part in economic opportunities, do you think there was no revolution in Britain because the middle class didn’t have the same complaints?

A: Almost certainly yes, although you will be well aware that many of the spies for Russia, USSR, during the Cold War were very middle class English men. There were Englishmen who were Marxists. There were English men who were middle class, but in, there were Englishmen who were pro, and very pro Hitler in particular, which I’ll come to next week. But the vast bulk of the English middle class were content, as, indeed, were the vast bulk of the working class content here. There was no middle class leadership. Somebody asked me last week about Jews in all of this, and I was with Trudy yesterday, and we were talking about these things. And what I said, I don’t know that Trudy I think Trudy did not agree. But what I said was that, with the Jews in Britain, the British Jews became very anglicised, very British, and you all know that, in Britain. And there’s examples that I could give. I haven’t got time, but briefly, it, there were middle class Jews. They held middle class British values. If they were working class Jews, they held working class values. There is no, you do not find that you’ve got a huge number of Jews within the Communist Party in Britain. You’ve got a large number of Jews and influential in both the Labour Party, in terms of the working class, and in the Conservative Party in terms of the middle class, because the Jews who came here adopted, whether they adopted by osmosis the British class system. Now, that’s very controversial, and we could argue a lot about that, but it’s worth me saying what I think. I say what I think. You can think for yourselves, and see, Sam was muffled. I don’t know. I have no idea why. It will be picked up by Lockdown. There’s nothing wrong with my little iPad. I assure you.

Q: Ted, this sounds a difficult question. With the current growing gap between the wealthy and the middle class, might there be a parallel event to the general strike of '26, 1926 in 2026, as more and more persons approach personal bankruptcy?

A: I hadn’t thought about, if you are talking about Britain, I guess, Ted, my view is that we are due a major political shift. That is not to say, revolution, but evolution, in which our political system has to change in order to be fit for purpose. And I don’t think it is fit for purpose. And that statement I think applies very clearly in the United States. America’s got to find its way past Trump, and arguably past Biden, to a world where you can disagree with the political party that wins, but in the main, they will command support as in Britain, from the majority of people once they’re elected, and you vote for your party, they’re brought in next. You just think about the quality of Republican and Democratic presidents in the quite recent past. And you can see that’s a very different world than the one that we’re in today. And my argument is that is also the case in Britain, not as blatant, because it seems one side of the political divide in Britain is worrying. The other side is less worrying, but not entirely unworrying, if that, if you can follow me. I think we’re both countries, and I think it applies probably in Canada and Australia as well, that we need to shake up the way that our democracy works. That’s all I think.

Q: Oh, Phil says, how did the growth of British fascism, wrong decade for today, right decade for next week. I will talk about that. Oh, could I repeat the name of the Austrian Jew?

A: It is Karl, K-A-R-L, Kraus, K-R-A-U-S. Karl Kraus, K-R-A-U-S. My, the book I used is on my blog, and of course, with his name as author. So you can look up on the blog.

What does it matter to us that there are so many MAGA Republicans says, Stan. Stan, I don’t know what, I don’t know whether you’re British, American or Canadian, but it matters enormously, because what happens in America impinges, for example, on NATO. Was Trump to win again, he’s on record as saying he will withdraw from NATO. That is a big green light in Moscow.

Yes, you’re right. Sorry. Romaine, you’re right.

Troy, it was language that guided Hitler’s evil. Yes. I agree with you. And which is why I wouldn’t agree with Kraus, but Kraus is writing this in 1933 before we really get to grips with it. And he, yeah, I, Bertolt Brecht criticised Kraus and said, “In your indictment of Nazism, you, Kraus, have disclosed the atrocities of intonation and created an ethics of language,” which is what he does in the book. And he talks about language a great deal. And a number of people have said that the book is, it’s been reprinted, that in, I guess in all our countries. I bought mine through Amazon. I think it’s an American publication originally. I may be wrong. Yeah, it’s a, yeah, I think originally printed in the States, and he does talk about language. Thanks.

And people are very nice. I was not looking forward to doing today. I mean, I always look forward to doing it. I don’t mean that, but I was nervous about doing it, because I find it very difficult to do this subject. If we were face-to-face and we had four one hour periods doing it, I don’t mind, because I can ask you questions and you can come back and we can look at stuff and I can do it. But doing a lecture for one hour, I’m always conscious of what I don’t say.

No, I, George, I’m sorry. It’s nothing to do with the microphone. I’m sorry. It’s, no, it’s nothing to do with that at all, I’m afraid. It’s outside of my control.

Yeah. You see, Rita says, I heard William just fine. You may want to check your own speaker’s volume. Yeah, we’ve had this in the past. It may be, as I say, something that went wrong at the Lockdown end, but it really isn’t anything to do with me, and I, that I’ve been all the way through that.

Next Monday is first day of Rosh Hashanah. No, somebody’s replied to that and says, it’s Saturday and Sunday. No, it, we have a break after next Monday. No? Yes. So no. We have a break the following week. Because next week I’m also doing a discussion about modern antisemitism with Trudy, in which you can see how I shall be cut up into small little academic pieces by the end of the hour. I shall be on the floor asking for my mummy to come and rescue me, I think, intellectually.

Q: Where can I find your book recommendations?

A: On my blog. You, it’s W-W-W-dot, one word, talkhistorian.com. www.talkhistorian.com, and then if you put forward slash blog, you’ll go straight through to it. You can see them all on there.

Mark says, “I would love to learn more about how you structure your talks.” Now, strangely enough, a long time ago, somebody, a teacher asked what I did, and we had a very interesting correspondence. I’ll tell you that’s, Mark, that’s a good question. I can’t promise to do it very quickly, but I will definitely do that for you and maybe others, because I find it interesting. I find it interesting to be self-critical.

When you answer the questions, we understand you better. Do you mean in hearing? I think it’s, I’m sorry. It really isn’t anything to do with sound. I’m sat in exactly where I was sat. I’m sorry, George. It, sometimes these things go mad. The first thing to do is just check your own side, because otherwise everyone would say they didn’t hear me, and that’s not the case. So in that way, logically, it’s not me, but it might be a connection you’ve got with Lockdown. That I can’t answer.

Look, thanks ever so much, everyone, for asking really interesting questions. I’m glad you enjoyed it. Next week then is the final one of the trio, but next Wednesday, Wednesday week, I’m with Trudy looking at modern antisemitism, and I’m going to begin with Germany. She will take it wider, and then we shall ask difficult questions, for which perhaps there are no answers. A new book has come out about antisemitism and anti-Israel, which I think is an excellent book, written by a Jew and somebody that Trudy knows. He’s the editor of “The Jewish Chronicle” here. I will put that on my site sometime as well.

• [Host] But thank you so much and we’ll see you next week.

• You’re welcome. See you next.

• Have a lovely evening. Bye, everyone.

• See you.