Cinema, Literature & Society

Elite and Mass Culture in Interwar Britain

Peter Miles, Malcolm Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317917472
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

During the interwar period cinema and literature seemed to be at odds with each other, part of the continuing struggle between mass and elite culture which so worried writers such as Aldous Huxley, T.S. Eliot and the Leavises. And this cultural divide appeared to be sharp evidence of a deeper struggle for control of the nation's consciousness, not only between dominant and oppositional elements within Britain, but between British and American vales as well.

On the one hand, films like Sing As We Go, Proud Valley, and The Stars Look Down consolidated the assumptions about the existence of a national rather than separate class identities. On the other hand, working-class literature such as Love on the Dole articulated working-class experience in a manner intended to bridge the gap between the 'Two Englands'.

This book, originally published in 1987, examines how two of the most significant cultural forms in Britain contributed indirectly to the stability of Britain in the interwar crisis, helping to construct a new class alliance. A major element in the investigation is an analysis of the mechanics of the development of a national cultural identity, alongside separate working-class culture, the development of the lower-middle class and the implications of the intrusion of Hollywood culture.

The treatment throughout is thematic rather than text-oriented – works of Graham Greene, George Orwell, Bert Coombes, Evelyn Waugh, the British Documentary Film Movement and Michael Balcon are included in the wide range of material covered.

Part One: ‘England, Whose England?’

1. THE POLITICS OF DEPRESSION

Any study of interwar British culture must begin with the most obvious fact of all, that the interwar period was one of prolonged depression. And it was in response to the depression that the mediatory role of culture was, also, most obvious. A study of the way in which culture operated at the sharpest point of possible conflict in this period, however, must involve much more than simply reading off the cinematic and literary images of unemployment and depression as though they were self-explanatory. The representation of the experience of the unemployed worked within a long-developing tradition of cross-class negotiation, of revealing one England to the other. These representations worked, too, within assumptions about the existence of a national family, sharing values and ideals across the class divide. Firstly, however, even the ‘obvious’ facts of the economic recession are not, any more, that obvious. Recent interpretations of the economic history of the interwar period need to be taken into account simply to contextualize precisely what experience it was that culture was mediating.

The Great Depression of the interwar years was not just an isolated event in British economic history. It had its roots in the long-term and slow relative decline of Britain as an industrial trading power, the first signs of which had already appeared in the years before the Great War. The institutionalized problems of the British economy were made much worse, however, by the effects of a war which Britain simply could not afford to fight, and the aftereffects of which created very complicated international trading conditions. The result was the best-documented and the most famous period of mass unemployment in British history, ‘the locust years’. Yet, though the period still remains a scar in the popular memory, some historians have recently begun to reconsider the interwar years and to conclude that the effects of the Great Depression have been greatly exaggerated, that unemployment was never more than a localized and minority problem, that contemporary social policy allowed a reasonable standard of existence even for the worse-off in comparison with previous periods. The revisionists contend that the social tension generated by the economic crisis should not be allowed to disguise the much more significant consensus of opinion that dominated the middle ground of British life in the period.

Clearly, however distressing was the experience of unemployment in these years, the effects were nothing like as devastating in Britain as they were elsewhere. All over Europe and in the United States, the effects of the Great Depression changed quite dramatically the forms of politics, whereas Britain carried on relatively quietly with Ramsay MacDonald, Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain. An explanation of this extraordinary stability that prevailed in Britain must take into account not just the differences between the experience of the Depression in Britain and elsewhere, but also the way in which the experience was mediated by the cultural context in which it occurred.

It is clearly true that the image of the interwar period as simply the years of the Means Test, of the dole queues and of the appeasement of the fascist dictators, badly needs revision. The revisionist historians have pointed out that any satisfactory overview of Britain in this period must also take into account the new economy that, for example, J.B Priestley saw in the environs of London in 1933, when unemployment was at its highest: ‘the England of arterial and by-pass roads, of filling stations and factories that looked like exhibition buildings, of giant cinemas and dance-halls and cafes, bungalows with tiny garages, cocktail bars, Woolworths’.(1) The 1930s saw the development of an affluent consumer society as well as the decay of the depressed areas, and the affluence of those who managed to remain in work in the developing consumer economy was a dominating influence on social patterns at the height of the Depression. The truth is that the period presents a paradox economically, of real distress amid relative affluence. It was the sharp division between the ‘two Englands’ – the England of the South and the Midlands, which were relatively prosperous, and the England of the Depressed Areas in the North, Wales and Scotland – which lent the interwar period its particular complexity.

The basic problem which faced Britain in the economic sphere was that of over-commitment to the staple export industries which had dominated the earlier stages of British industrial development. Britain’s industrial revolution had been export-led; the Big Four in the industrial economy – textiles, coal, heavy metals and ship building – all relied overwhelmingly on exports for their continued development. In steel production, for example, Britain already relied on exports to take up 80 per cent of production by the turn of the twentieth century. Such an over-reliance on just four industries, and on exports, proved to be no problem while Britain had the world markets to herself. Already by the 1870s and 1880s, however, the period of the so-called Great Price Fall, Britain was facing increasing international competition from new trading nations. British firms were traditionally only small and under-capitalized, and found it difficult to compete with the huge combines like the German and American steel firms. Then, as the secondary industrialization of the late nineteenth century began to place full emphasis on new industries like engineering and chemicals, Britain soon found herself left behind: British financial institutions were so geared to the servicing of the basic industries that capital was not easily forthcoming for these new and large investments. These problems were temporarily overlaid in the years before 1918 by a number of short-term expedients. First, the expansion of the Empire served as a market for goods that could no longer be sold in the European and American markets. Second, the increasing international friction in Europe created a new demand for armaments and, with the major changes that were taking place in naval technology from the late nineteenth century on, the heavy metals and ship building industries found themselves with fuller order books than ever before. Finally, there followed the unprecedented demand of the Great War itself. The first of the machine wars, with its voracious demand for all that British industry could produce, not only ate up spare capacity but also encouraged the development of further potential. Indeed, in an attempt to maximize production, the State was forced to step in as never before. The mining industry, for example, was taken over by a Ministry of Mines: pits that were unprofitable were kept open, and miners’ wages subsidized, in order to maintain the maximum output.(2)

In the years after 1918, the bubble burst, and the problems that had lain dormant since the period of the Great Price Fall came to the fore with a vengeance. Britain was left with massive spare capacity in the middle of a world slump, and with many of her overseas investments sold off to help to pay for the war. The United States, in the period of isolation which had preceded her entry into the war, had effortlessly expanded her economic potential at the expense not just of Britain but of Europe as a whole. Though some of Britain’s industries enjoyed a brief post-war boom, the palmy days were over when German industry began to recover in the 1920s. British industrial problems were not helped by a government policy which aimed at ‘a return to normality’ which meant, in effect, a withdrawal of government control and therefore also of government subsidy from industries which had been artificially stimulated by the national wartime demand. At the same time, the policy of the Treasury was to deflate the economy, cutting public expenditure to allow a return to the pre-war Gold Standard. In fact Britain duly returned to the Gold Standard in 1925, overpricing sterling by somewhere between 2 and 10 per cent, thus creating a further major problem for exporters.(3) One industry, coal, responded to the consequent increase in export price by announcing a cut in wages for its employees, which led directly to the General Strike of 1926.

A central aspect of the problem that resulted was that the major export industries were not only faced independently with extremely difficult trading conditions on the world stage; they were also inter-dependent. Ship-building, heavy metals and coal, for example, were so interlinked that the slump in demand for all three bred a spiralling depression. Significantly, too, these industries had traditionally been very concentrated geographically, with socially catastrophic results for communities like those in South Wales, Lancashire, Yorkshire, County Durham and the Central Lowlands of Scotland. Towns like those in the Rhondda, entirely dependent on coal mining, or Jarrow, where ship-building provided the only employment for men, were particularly hard hit.

The relative prosperity of areas like the South and the Midlands in fact depended on the continuing depression in the North of Britain and in Wales. The depression in the basic industries meant a general fall in prices, but wages and salaries for those who were lucky enough to remain in employment did not fall as quickly as prices, with the effect that average purchasing power in Britain rose by something like 24 per cent in the interwar period. It was this very large rise in real spending power which fed the consumer boom of the 1930s. In this sense, those who remained in employment grew more prosperous literally on the backs of the unemployed. Three million new houses were built in the 1930s, the large majority of these being for private sale rather than local authority use. One million new cars filled the roads in the decade, and by 1939 advertising for the new domestic consumer market was a 100 million pound industry.(4)

The consumer boom hardly touched the problems of the distressed areas. The new industries were usually reliant on new power sources like electricity or oil, and therefore provided only a marginal stimulus to the ailing coal industry. Though car production and house building did stimulate demand for steel, the demand for new synthetic products was even more significant. As a result, the consumer industries tended to develop as a quite separate growth area within the economy, stimulating other new industries rather than helping out the failing giants. These industries also tended to concentrate geographically near the great consumer centres whose population they employed; there was little point opening a new car factory in South Wales, for instance, since there was little money locally to buy the product and the producer would simply be increasing his transport costs. All other things being equal, without government stimulation in the form of financial incentives, the new consumer economy would do nothing to cure the problems of the depressed areas.

Thus, as the depressed areas spiralled downwards, the consumer industry areas spiralled upwards. A quite distinct line developed, dividing the South East and the Midlands from the rest of the country. Disraeli’s notion that there were, in fact, ‘Two Englands’ – the rich and the poor – was a geographical as well as an economic fact.

Unemployment by Region, 1929–1936.(5)
(per cent.)

London 8.8.

South East 7.8.

South West 11.1

Midlands 15.2

North East 22.7

North West 21.4

Scotland 21.8

Wales 30.1.

Great Britain 16.9

South Britain 11.1

North and Wales 22.8

For the depressed areas, real recovery did not begin until the rearmament boom of the late 1930s. Small wonder, therefore, that there is a temptation to dismiss as the ‘locust years’ a period when the economic problems that followed one war were only overcome by preparing for another war, against the same enemy and on basically the same issue. It is difficult to make value judgements about this paradoxical economic situation. As Peter Mathias has noted: ‘So much depends on whether the spotlight is turned on Jarrow or Slough, on Merthyr Tydfil or Oxford, on Greenock and Birkenhead or on Coventry, Weston-Super-Mare and the environs of London’.(6) It is clear that the nation as a whole was better off than in Edwardian days. It is equally clear, however, that one section of the community, the section upon which Britain’s industrialization had developed and upon which her economic strength had depended for more than a century, was missing out on the relative material progress that the rest of the country was now beginning to enjoy.

This relative deprivation is in fact the key issue involved. Most of Britain was not unemployed, not badly housed and not living in an environmentally deprived area. Most of Britain remained only dimly aware of the problems of the far-away smoky North and the Celtic fringes. It was in this period that the Labour Party built up its large majorities in those areas that were to become its strongholds, but large majorities in single constituencies still only win one parliamentary seat. For the 1935 geneial election it is possible to draw a line on the map from Bristol to the Wash below which Labour won only a tiny handful of seats. And the contingent from the North, from South Wales and from Scotland found itself in the House of Commons faced with consistent Conservative majorities elected by the other England, majorities which in the elections of 1931 and 1935 proved overwhelming. Whether the radicals liked it or not, the relatively affluent were in the driving seat. The working class was divided between the two economies, between unemployment and employment, segregated by the cultural geography of the ‘Two Englands’.Moreover the development of the consumer economy, and of the service industries, brought in their train the huge growth of the lower management and clerical labour goups. The values and...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Defining Terms: Culture, Ideology And Social Process
• Part One: ‘England, Whose England?'
• Part Two: Elite and Mass Culture
• Part Three: ‘My Country Right or Left'
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index