Heroes and happy endings

Class, gender, and nation in popular film and fiction in interwar Britain

Christine Grandy

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781526111203
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: History

This is a highly anticipated examination of the popular film and fiction consumed by Britons in the 1920s and 1930s. Departing from a prevailing emphasis on popular culture as escapist, Christine Grandy offers a fresh perspective by noting the enduring importance of class and gender divisions in the narratives read and watched by the working and middle classes between the wars. This compelling study ties contemporary concerns about ex-soldiers, profiteers, and working and voting women to the heroes, villains and love-interests that dominated a range of films and novels. Heroes and happy endings further considers the state's role in shaping the content of popular narratives through censorship. An important and highly readable work for scholars and students interested in cultural and social history, as well as media and film studies, this book is sure to shift our understanding of the role of mass culture in the 1920s and 1930s.

1

A man imagined: heroes, work, and nation

For the last three years, ever since his demobilization, life had been to Sorrell like some huge trampling beast, and he – a furtive thing down in the mud, panting, dodging, bewildered, resentful and afraid.

Warwick Deeping, Sorrell and Son (1925)

On 30 May 1919, the Daily Express, one of Britain’s largest circulating newspapers, quoted the Prince of Wales saying, ‘I shall never regret my period of service overseas. In those four years I mixed with men. In those four years I found my manhood.’ The article further documented the tributes granted to the Prince for his service in World War I, not the least of which was an informal parade through London featuring ‘the acclamations of the citizens, who gathered in the thousands to greet him’.¹

This hero’s welcome, as historians have noted, was what many soldiers expected upon their return to Britain after the war. Yet even as the Prince celebrated the discovery of his masculinity in war, it was clear that numerous soldiers did not feel the same way. That same May had witnessed a number of demonstrations by recently demobilised and unemployed soldiers and those soldiers still enlisted. On 27 May, a demonstration near Westminster Abbey turned violent. A police officer was pulled from his horse in the fray and hospitalised, while others were hit with ‘wooden paving blocks’ thrown by the ex-soldiers.² The government seemed to be largely sympathetic to the protesters, declaring to the press that, ‘If, after a reasonable time trade did not reassert itself and absorb the unemployed ex-servicemen, steps would be taken to introduce schemes to deal effectively with the whole problem.’³ But, by 1925, when Warwick Deeping’s bestselling novel Sorrell and Son was published, it was clear that the market had been unable to ‘deal effectively’ with the unemployment of ex-soldiers. In the winter of 1920 there were over two million men out of work and this figure did not drop below one million for the entirety of the interwar period.⁴

The experience of men who did not receive a parade of welcome upon their return from the war contributed to the success of a number of interwar novels and films that engaged with the plight of the soldier. Deeping’s description in Sorrell and Son of Stephen Sorrell’s experience following demobilisation emphasised a process of dehumanisation and emasculation. The ‘panting’ and ‘dodging’ in the mud symbolised the protagonist’s exposure to unemployment, thereby highlighting similarities between unemployment and the dehumanisation of war. As Billie Melman points out, the trials of the ex-soldier as he returned to civilian life was a common theme in popular novels of the 1920s.⁵ This theme continued to resonate beyond the 1920s and throughout the interwar period in both novels and films. Numerous bestsellers of the first half of the 1920s dealt directly with the unemployment and disillusionment of the ex-soldier, and many other novels and films beyond that period included characters indelibly marked by their service to their country. Deeping, Philip Gibb, A. S. M Hutchinson, Michael Arlen, E. Philips Oppenheim, and H. C. McNeile were just a few of the bestselling novelists who profited from a focus upon the ex-soldier. Films such as Lives of a Bengal Lancer, Bulldog Drummond (1929), Cavalcade, and Mutiny on the Bounty, among others, either emphasised the role of the World War I soldier or strove to situate their hero within a combat situation. These films did extremely well at the box office. The soldier became a key figure in the popular formula of a hit film or bestseller. It was his story that was most in need of the stabilising influence offered by popular culture’s ideological framework.

This fictional presentation of the soldier must be evaluated alongside the numerous non-fiction biographies published at the end of the 1920s by upper-class writers such as Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon.⁶ These works by the ‘soldier poets’ have long been used both within the classroom and within seminal works such as Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory to illustrate the effect of World War I upon ex-soldiers and, by an extension that is often taken for granted, British society.⁷ Yet Janet S. K. Watson notes that the period from 1928 to 1930 witnessed a veritable boom in ‘war novels’ that made the war and its soldiers their subjects, along with those works by the ‘soldier poets’. I would argue that the boom in war novels occurred over a much longer period and that the boom in war narratives should take into account the popularity of film. It is only by looking at the interwar period as a whole and examining both novels and films from a range of producers that the extent of the war’s impact upon a generation can be gauged.

Common to lowbrow and middlebrow novels and films was the display and recuperation of a particular type of British manhood that was under threat. In these narratives British masculinity rooted in ideas of work and nation was destabilised at the outset and was largely restored by the end. The aim here is not to discount the feelings of disillusionment presented by the soldier poets but rather to broaden the perspective on the war’s impact in order to address the middle and working classes as consumers of popular culture and to more accurately gauge the extent of disillusionment with ideals of work and nation across these classes. As Graham Dawson has said in his discussion of the appeal of Lawrence of Arabia to post-World War I audiences, ‘The history of masculinities must therefore include within its scope the tracing of those many and varied historical imaginings which have given shape, purpose and direction to the lives of men.’⁸ We shall see that the post-World War I disillusionment of Graves and Sassoon in 1930 was evident throughout the entirety of the interwar period and encompassed much more than the upper middle and upper-class ex-soldiers of Oxford and Cambridge. It also included the decidedly more middle, lower middle-class, and working-class men and women who bought or borrowed low and middlebrow novels and visited the cinema.

In examining the wider impact of the war upon the working and middle classes, this study also moves beyond a focus on interwar disillusionment with concepts such as valour and honour to include the much more tangible and equally disillusioning experience of finding work in a period of depression. In this chapter I argue that the common characteristics of the hero in these popular novels and films constituted a type of masculinity that was destabilised by specific concerns in two areas following World War I – work and nation. Central to the concerns of these bestsellers and films were male anxieties about the position of men within the economy and the nation.⁹ The ‘culture industry’ catered to these specific concerns about class, nation, and masculinity. Adorno notes the repetitive pattern endorsed for heroes within the culture industry, arguing that by the end of the narrative, and ‘in empty harmony, they are reconciled with the general, whose demands they had experienced at the outset as irreconcilable with their interests’.¹⁰ Heroes are thus returned to the collective and fashioned as central to this ‘empty harmony’ necessary for the narrative. What is clear from popular fiction and films is that post-war harmony included a reassertion of the masculine soldier as employed and re-dedicated to broad notions of British nationalism. The widespread popularity with British audiences of bestselling novels and films that featured a soldier figure is a testament to the impact of war and unemployment upon British conceptions of masculinity. These popular narratives indicate the management and rejection of this impact, for they ultimately worked to recuperate conventional pre-war notions of work, nation, and masculinity.

Soldiers, World War I, and the aftermath

The end of World War I marked the beginning of a particularly turbulent time in Britain for soldiers, workers, and Parliament. The confusion and anger surrounding the uneven demobilisation of almost four million soldiers was just a sign of things to come. The protests by ex-soldiers that occurred in 1919 continued into 1920, and the government appeared to be ineffective at addressing the concerns of ex-soldiers regarding employment. The Daily Express reported on a riot in London in 1920 that a medical staff member said ‘was almost like being in France’, and the paper called throughout the interwar period for Parliament to do something about unemployment.¹¹ Instead of experiencing one decade of acute economic problems in the 1930s as the United States did, Britain suffered two decades of relatively constant unemployment, with unemployment figures consistently showing at least a million men out of work and peaking at three million unemployed men in 1932.¹² Not surprisingly, the government was forced to expand the ‘dole’ as the decade wore on, through a modified Unemployment Insurance Act.¹³ The interwar economy remained weak, with periods of high inflation worsening the effects of unemployment. The headline that the Daily Express ran in June 1919, ‘The appalling cost of everything’, was followed by a list of prices of various goods in 1914 and 1919. The subtitle that said ‘When will it stop?’ was still relevant at the close of the 1920s.¹⁴ The ultimate price of this turbulence was strained relations between soldiers and the nation they were meant to represent during and after the war.

Much speculation resulted about what and who was at the root of the depression that plagued the interwar period – everyone from Bolsheviks to women workers were identified by the press, the bestsellers, and films as culprits – but Parliament was a particularly compelling target immediately following the war. The disastrous post-World War I coalition government under Lloyd George took much of the initial blame, but even with a change in government to the conservatives in 1922 and again in 1924 to the relatively new Labour party, these types of complaints continued. Distinctions between parties were blurred in the press as well as popular culture, no doubt aided by the dominance of the conservatives throughout the interwar period.¹⁵ The New Statesman declared in 1920, ‘Behind every failure and every muddle of the last two years it is possible to perceive the same fundamental cause. It is not that the British Government has pursued wrong policies, but that is has had no policy and kept no faith … Everywhere it cheats.’¹⁶ Indeed, the dishonest dealings of politicians were a preoccupation of interwar popular culture, as will be illustrated in Chapter 2. Popular culture developed its own particular blend of ‘reality’ and fiction in this period, just as British society as a whole became concerned with the fictions and realities of politicians. Politics was increasingly seen by some as an elaborate performance conducted in order to hide the ‘truth’ from the people, a feeling very much in evidence even at the eve of World War II, as we shall see. Political disillusionment and attention to performance and truth were important aspects of film and fiction in the 1920s and 1930s.

The character whose job it was to see through the corrupt performances of politicians and dishonest businessmen was the hero – often an ex-soldier whose role was actively equated with ‘Englishness’ in these novels and films. Philip Dodd argues that ‘Englishness’ in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was located in Britain’s public institutions such as the universities as well as within the teaching of subjects like history that were increasingly organised to serve what were deemed national and imperial needs.¹⁷ He goes on to note that this portrayal of the past privileged a type of masculinity that was primarily middle or upper class, thus making the incorporation of other groups such as women and the working class a significant challenge to ‘Englishness’ after 1920. Dodd’s argument can be extended to include the military as another masculine institution that served the interests of Britain in its wider sense, an approach that Michael Paris has drawn upon in his conceptualisation of Britain as a ‘Warrior Nation’.¹⁸ Characters within interwar mass culture tended to speak of ‘England’ far more often than they did of Britain, seemingly offering support for Alison Light’s assertion that the interwar period saw the development of a ‘little England’ rather than a Great Britain.¹⁹ Yet they spoke of England and Englishmen and acted for Britain in ways that defied Light’s notion of a little England. These were ex-soldiers protecting Britain from domestic and foreign plots. Englishness was thus defined in low and middlebrow works as virtually synonymous with a protection of Britain’s dominant institutions.

The concept of heroic masculinity rooted in nationalist glory is not new in British history. Michael Paris, much like George Mosse before him, argues that little separation existed between masculinity and the nation in the nineteenth century.²⁰ This rhetoric was particularly compelling in the late Victorian and Edwardian period when love of one’s nation and action upon this love coincided with British ideals of manliness, as well as Britain’s imperial mission.²¹ Colonial warfare was represented as an adventure, and Englishness and the British institution of warfare were very much related.²² Newspaper reporting also participated in the rhetoric of adventure stories by equating the colonial soldier with Britain abroad and emphasising the thrilling aspects of colonial warfare ra...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• General editor’s introduction
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: the role of popular culture between the wars
• 1 A man imagined: heroes, work, and nation
• 2 The shape of villainy: profiteering and money-men
• 3 That magic moment: the female love-interest and the villainess
• 4 Building character: censorship, the Home Office, and the BBFC
• Conclusion: thoughts on heroes, villains, and love-interests beyond 1939
• Appendix: Censorable items compiled in 1917 from the BBFC’s Annual Reports of 1913–15
• Bibliography
• Index