Interwar Britain Research Articles

‘The Curse of the Co-ops’: Co-operation, the Mass Press and the Market in Interwar Britain

Abstract Though it continues to be neglected by historians, the British Co-operative movement had 6.5 million members in the early 1930s. The movement’s phenomenal success inevitably brought it into conflict with both private capitalists and government, who sought to contain co-operators’ ambitions. The movement’s ideologues proclaimed that the great lesson of the Depression was that markets ought to be regulated by the democratic will of the people and that co-operative success proved that this was both practicable and possible. This article assesses the threat that co-operation posed to economic and business elites in this period, highlighting particularly co-operators’ critique of the myth of the ‘free’ market and their fears concerning the rapid post-war growth of combines and syndicates. It explores co-operators’ thwarted attempt to regulate markets in the interest of working-class shoppers by means of the Consumers’ Council Bill after 1929 and then goes on to discuss the ‘penal’ taxation imposed on the Co-operative movement as a kind of disciplinary measure by the National Government in 1933. The role of the mass-circulation press provides a vital thread in the story throughout, for the anti-co-operative ‘crusade’ was fervently taken up by the press barons, Lord Beaverbrook and Lord Rothermere, who used all the powers at their disposal to try to extinguish the largest democratic movement of consumers Britain had ever had.

Reproduction by Design: Sex, Robots, Trees, & Test-Tube Babies in Interwar Britain, Angus McLaren

<i>Reproduction by Design: Sex, Robots, Trees, &amp; Test-Tube Babies in Interwar Britain</i>, Angus McLaren

The Changing Media Representation of T. E. Lawrence and Celebrity Culture in Britain, 1919–1935

This article presents a new analysis of representations of T. E. Lawrence to explore how the media created celebrity identities in interwar Britain. Examining his appearance in seventeen national newspapers and in newsreels between 1919 and 1935, it shows how earlier press depictions that borrowed from Lowell Thomas’s portrayal of him as the mythical ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ were disrupted by a nascent media-driven celebrity culture which aimed to uncover intimate details of the lives of the so-called ‘real’ people that were believed to exist behind the outward personae of the famous. By the late 1920s, the press’s attention had switched from Lawrence as an imperial adventurer to focus on the intensely private man who lay behind the public image of the ‘Blonde Bedouin’. This shift in emphasis denoted a significant change in the way celebrities were presented by the news media in interwar Britain. Journalists intensified their exposure of celebrities’ private lives to amplify the empathetic connection between the public and the famous at a time when new modes of self-fashioning were configured through expression in private, domestic life. This shift was also informed by growing anxieties regarding how public figures communicated their social authority to the new audiences of the interwar mass media, newspapers and newsreels exposing famous people’s private lives to generate emotional connections with members of the public which would strengthen concepts of social leadership and trust.

戦間期イギリスの国際関係研究における「理論」:―チャタム・ハウスにおけるナショナリズム論をめぐって―

戦間期イギリスの国際関係研究における「理論」:―チャタム・ハウスにおけるナショナリズム論をめぐって―

Discovering Science from an Armchair: Popular Science in British Magazines of the Interwar Years

ABSTRACTAnalysing the contents of magazines published with the stated intention of conveying information about science and technology to the public provides a mechanism for evaluation what counted as ‘popular science’. This article presents numerical surveys of the contents of three magazines published in inter-war Britain (Discovery, Conquest and Armchair Science) and offers an evaluation of the results. The problem of defining relevant topic-categories is addressed, both direct and indirect strategies being employed to ensure that the topics correspond to what the editors and publishers took to be the principal areas of science and technology of interest to their readers. Analysis of the results of the surveys reveals different editorial policies depending on the backgrounds of the publishers and their anticipated readerships. The strong focus of the two most populist magazines on applied science and ‘hobbyist’ topics such as natural history, radio and motoring is noted and contrasted with the very limited coverage of theoretical science. In conclusion, a survey of changes in the contents over the periods of publication is used to identify trends in the coverage of science during this period.

Restoring the Clutter of the Everyday

Maggie Andrews and Sallie McNamara's Women and the Media: Feminism and Femininity in Britain, 1900 to the Present, New York: Routledge, 2014Christine Grandy's Heroes and Happy Endings: Class, Gender, and Nation in Popular Film and Fiction in Interwar Britain, Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2014These two engrossing books approach twentieth-century cultural studies from different perspectives-where Heroes and Happy Endings is specific in time and genre as a window into gender dynamics, Women and the Media spans the century, with diverse subjects, focusing attention on womens roles. This latter focus is a more traditional approach to women studies, to be sure, but both yield similar revelations about womens status, if with different valences. Heroes sees the persistence of masculine narratives holding women in place while Women traces efforts to resist such ongoing sidelining. In neither case do the insights so much shift our understanding as fill in gaps through their welcome attention to overlooked and underexamined cultural products.Women comprises seventeen essays (including the introduction) by thirteen authors-coeditors Maggie Andrews and Sallie McNamara author five and three essays, respectively, meaning they contributed roughly half the collection. limited number of contributors belies the gratifying breadth of subject matter. Gillian Murray's piece about midcentury media depictions of female bus drivers renews the imperative within cultural studies for scholars to, in Janet Mussell's words, restor[e] the clutter of the everyday (quoted in Andrews and McNamara 2014,171 ). collection aptly fulfills this mission, leading readers through the pastimes and work environments of women, often disclosing the existence of a wealth of underexplored archival resources. From its opening body chapter, a delightful investigation of representations of women's motorcycle riding before WWI, to its analysis of the market and cultural forces shaping the placement and salaciousness of pinup photographs in the popular press, the book offers an eclectic sample rather than a comprehensive survey.Despite the seemingly scattershot subject matter, however, the editors have curated the collection carefully, so that it traces several strains of media across the twentieth century. volume is organized by periods, each containing at least one chapter on print media and one on radio and/ or television; all time periods except 1900-1939 also have at least one film chapter. Through these recurrences, the reader begins to develop a familiarity and fluency with, for instance, the BBC's efforts to create programming for women; the struggles of women in male-dominated fields like architecture, photojournalism, and bus driving; or the uneasy fit many professional women had within the publications for which they wrote. chapters are thus in productive conversation with one another, notably in the sequence devoted to the BBC's Women's Hour, Other Women's Lives, and Women's Viewpoint. Similarly, chapters on periodical culture trace public anxiety about the sexuality of young women from the 1950s and 60s, when most magazines, according to Rachel Ritchie, were frank about sexuality when it aided in their enforcement of married heterosexual norms, while they downplayed contemporary controversial topics like race and the Pill ( 143-55). Fan Carter's chapter about teen magazines in the 1990s astutely characterizes MP Peter Luff as emblematic of an ahistoricizing moral panic, constructing girls as vulnerable, impressionable, passive consumers of increasingly consumerist, sexually frank magazines (231-43).The investigations of film are particularly interesting in their collective analysis of depictions of prostitution across eras. One of the highlights is Paul Elliott's The Iron Lady and the Working Girl: Image of the Prostitute in 1980s British Cinema, notable for its attention to genre as well as ideology. …

To Encourage, Inspire and Guide

This article examines the promotion of civil defence or ‘national service’ in interwar Britain. Analysing a recruitment campaign organised by the Chamberlain government in 1938–1939, it explores how civil defence was promoted in newspapers, posters, leaflets, guides, radio broadcasts, speeches and rallies, and how recruiters planned and executed the campaign. Existing literature has tended to focus on the role of national servicemen and servicewomen in wartime, but little is known about how these individuals were persuaded to join up before the war began or how national service was itself presented in the media. Through an analysis of official files, correspondence, advertisements and public relations, this article argues that the campaign for national service was not simply intended to attract new recruits, but to cement in Britain the notion that any future conflict would represent a ‘people’s war’ in which each citizen would contribute an equal share towards victory.

The Carnegie Dietary Survey of Interwar Britain

This research note describes an under-used collection of papers which document interwar income, nutrition and health in Britain which were created in the administration of the Carnegie Dietary Survey by John Boyd-Orr in the Rowett Institute with funding from the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust. The survey was conducted in 16 rural and urban places across England and Scotland between 1937-9, and are now held at the Specialist Collections Centre at the University of Aberdeen. While the importance of the survey in informing knowledge about nutrition and the development of rationing has been acknowledged in the field of social medicine, the survey data has primarily been used by epidemiological scientists and economic historians. After outlining the survey's past influences and uses, this item details the possible ways the data could be used by social, economic and local population historians.

Charabancs and Social Class in 1930s Britain

The renowned writer J. B. Priestley suggested in 1934 that the motor-coach had annihilated the old distinction between rich and poor passengers in Britain. This article considers how true this was by examining the relationship between charabancs, motor coaches and class. It shows that this important vehicle of inter-war working class mobility had a complicated relationship with class, identifying three distinct forms of this method of travel. It positions the charabanc alongside historical responses to unwelcome steamer and railway day-trippers, and examines how resorts provided separate class-based entertainment for these holidaymakers. Using the case study of a new charabanc-welcoming pub, the Prospect Inn, it proposes that, in the late 1930s, some pubs were beginning to offer charabanc customers facilities that were almost the match of their middle class equivalent. Motor coaches and charabancs contributed to the process of social convergence in inter-war Britain.

C.L.R. James in Imperial Britain by Christian Hogsbjerg, and: Toussaint Louverture: The Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History by C.L.R. James (review)

Reviewed by: C.L.R. James in Imperial Britain by Christian Hogsbjerg, and: Toussaint Louverture: The Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History by C.L.R. James Leslie James C.L.R. James in Imperial Britain By Christian Hogsbjerg. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014. Toussaint Louverture: The Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History By C.L.R. James. Edited and Introduced by Christian Hogsbjerg. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2013 Great individuals, C.L.R. James tells us in his Preface to the First Edition of the Black Jacobins (1938), make history—“but only such history as it is possible for them to make.” Unearthing the “possibilities” of a person’s environment is the “business of the historian.” James’ stress upon the encounter between the individual and the whole demanded an attentive historical methodology aimed at appreciating extraordinary leaders, without canonizing them. Indeed it is this tension, between the hero and the masses, which stands as a key feature of James’ entire corpus. Beginning with The Life and Times of A.A. Cipriani onward, James exhibited a profound fascination for exploring the historical personality of political leaders; in other words, with the “training” of the mind and how this informed political ideas and action. In two new resources on C.L.R. James—one a previously unpublished playscript by James—those interested in James’ work are given the opportunity to revisit his political and intellectual ripening, encountering the individual in the world that shaped him. In Toussaint Louverture: The story of the only successful slave revolt in history, James’ earliest efforts to commemorate the great revolutionary leader who “made” the Haitian slave revolt are enlivened by reviews of the original 1936 production, as well as selected essays and correspondence from the time. And in C.L.R. James in Imperial Britain, Christian Hogsbjerg relocates the radicalization of C.L.R. James in Britain, rather than the United States, showing how James’ time in Britain, and particularly in the mining town of “Red Nelson,” developed his career not just as a writer, but as a political being. Hogsbjerg’s ultimate aim is twofold: to situate the roots of James’ future work in the political world of interwar Britain and, in doing so, to demonstrate that of all the many facets of James’ work—black nationalism, Marxism, West Indian history and culture—only the Marxist method fundamentally explains the totality of his work. Hogsbjerg’s study begins by examining how James identified with imperial Britain while growing up in Trinidad, acknowledging the improvisational tradition of creative realism characteristic of Caribbean cultural and philosophical thought that allowed James to see British culture and politics with such insight. The first chapter, which focuses on James’ reimagining and reinventing of Victorian imperial culture while still in Trinidad, sets the stage for subsequent chapters that richly mine the archive of James’ short stay in Bloomsbury in early 1932, his ten-month stay with cricket legend Learie Constantine in the working-class town of Nelson (a key turning point in James’ radicalization), his political role in British socialist parties like the Independent Labour Party and, perhaps most fruitfully, James’ largely unexamined cricket journalism with the Manchester Guardian. As Hogsbjerg shows, James’ early cricket reports displayed many of the key features of his future work, Beyond a Boundary. When the Guardian’s sports editor dispatched James to report on a cricket match, his summaries described not just the match itself, but the crowd who assembled in the stands. For James, the spaces where cricket was played in England, and the way it was played, served as historical allusions imbued with the history of the place itself and the character of the people. James’ reports evidenced his “dialectical interaction between the individual and the collective” whereby the athlete is extraordinary, but the extraordinary individual is never possible without the collective. James himself claimed that cricket taught him about “the character of the English people”; and it was “the people” who became the key aspect of James’ political formulation. For as James travelled throughout England as a sports reporter, he continued to develop his ideological training and political skill. Rather than...

Skating on the Border: Hockey, Class, and Commercialism in Interwar Britain

Voici un article qui traite de l’évolution du hockey en Grande-Bretagne depuis son apparition au milieu du XIX e siècle jusqu’aux beaux jours de son exploitation commerciale dans les années 1930. L’auteur se penche également sur le fait que le Canada soit mis à part dans les travaux savants existants sur l’Empire britannique « ludique » et sur l’impression que les sports nord-américains n’avaient qu’une importance mineure dans la culture populaire britannique. Il pose comme postulat qu’il faut réexaminer la place du Canada dans cet empire en s’appuyant sur la théorie des régions limitrophes pour montrer que les Britanniques ont adopté le hockey et l’ont inclus dans leurs propres intérêts et, en outre, que ce sport a manifestement fait partie d’une culture commune dans l’Atlantique Nord.

‘Throbb[ing] with a consciousness of a knowledge that appalled her’: Embodiment and Female Subjectivity in the Desert Romance

:This article examines the relationship between the desert and embodiment in E. M. Hull’s international best-seller The Sheik (1919). This novel, a desert romance, has been the focus of feminist scholarship for decades because of its controversial rape narrative. Drawing on theories of embodiment, in particular the work of Elizabeth Grosz, the author interrogates how the desert is paradoxically presented as a space of liberation and oppression within which female sexuality could be explored despite the gendered violence of pre-existing patriarchal frameworks. Ultimately, the author provides a reading of Diana in terms of her transition from an androgynous ‘girl’ to a sexually desiring, seemingly feminized ‘woman’, and examines the connotations associated with this. The author establishes a connection between the transient nature of the desert and the liberation offered to women within this liminal space. Through an in-depth examination of the protagonist Diana’s corporeal subjectivity over the course of the novel, the author positions The Sheik as offering a voice to female sexuality and erotic fantasy, demonstrating Hull’s depiction of the desert as an appropriation of that space through which to explore female desires. This opens up new understandings of what constituted innovative literature in interwar Britain and marks Hull’s book, with its overtly erotic content and specific focus on female desire, as a political and social departure.

‘The Imperial Spirit’: British Fascism and Empire, 1919-1940

This article analyses the relationship between British fascism and Empire during the interwar period. Based on the premise that historians have neglected the imperial dimension of fascist ideology in interwar Britain, a brief review of existing scholarship will be undertaken before an analysis of fascist ideological conceptions of the British Empire. Looking at the three major fascist parties during the interwar era, the British Fascisti (BF), Imperial Fascist League (IFL) and British Union of Fascists (BUF), it will be demonstrated that whilst unequivocal support for the Empire was a consistent theme throughout fascist rhetoric, individual parties adapted their imperial visions according to their respective ideology. For the BF, the Empire was under constant threat from communist subversion at home and abroad. The IFL looked to demonstrate how international Jewry was attempting to destroy the British Empire. The BUF, developing the most sophisticated ideology and policies relating to Empire, believed a unified ‘organic’ Empire must be consolidated through trade and one ruler if Britain was to remain a global power fit to fight off the pincers of Jewish and communist subversion. This article will conclude by highlighting the need for further enquiry into the relationship between the extreme right and Empire.

The scrapbooking detective: Frederick Porter Wensley and the limits of ‘celebrity’ and ‘authority’ in inter-war Britain

Frederick Porter Wensley was one of Scotland Yard's ‘Big Four’ detectives, head of the Metropolitan Police Criminal Investigation Department and responsible for establishing the Flying Squad. On his retirement in 1929, he used the two bound scrapbooks of press clippings and photographs he had collated to document his personal life and career to inform his 1931 autobiography Detective Days and serialized press articles. Through examining the interaction of material between scrapbooks and autobiographical writings, this article explores how Wensley constructed his post-retirement persona as ‘celebrity detective’ from a canny understanding of what had made him a commercial subject for the press. It argues that Wensley recast his life to promote his own successes at the expense of a narrative of police unity, providing a vehicle for him to suggest further changes to the structure of the police force without official sanction. By juxtaposing this against tightening legislation on police communication with journalists during the inter-war period under the Official Secrets Acts, this article demonstrates how the ‘celebrity’ that Wensley sought to occupy was increasingly regarded as irreconcilable with police ability to effect ‘impartial’ regulation, anticipating the concerns raised by the 2012 Leveson Inquiry into the Culture, Practice and Ethics of the Press. The article thus charts a turning point in defining the relationship between police and press.

Direction and discretion: the roles of centre and branch in the interwar management of Marks and Spencer

The successful expansion of multiple retailing in interwar Britain is often seen to rest, in part, on the inculcation of efficient and uniform working practices throughout a company's branch network. Major multiple retailers often placed considerable stress on codifying the standards expected of store managers and their staff; on creating systems of branch supervision and inspection by staff directly responsible to head office; and on the submission of frequent and detailed returns outlining the operational and financial performance of individual stores. In practice, however, this did not always lead to the degree of operational centralisation and uniformity that is sometimes assumed. Evidence from the Marks and Spencer Archive reveals not only the limitations of local compliance with officially sanctioned policies and processes, but also an expectation that managers would exercise positive discretion in implementing standards in a locally appropriate fashion. The article thus sheds new light on the role of the multiple store manager – hitherto a somewhat neglected figure – in the retail evolution of the interwar years.

Getting it right? Lessons from the interwar years on pulmonary tuberculosis control in England and Wales.

This paper examines morbidity and mortality patterns in interwar England and Wales, using previously under-explored primary archival source materials. These materials help us understand not only what local authorities could and did do, but also the reasons for the marked variations in the ability of different authorities to manage the problem. We identify where and why there were problems and also how and why some authorities were more successful than others in dealing with the disease. Wealth was not an issue. We find a combination of pro-active preventative measures was significant.

Ireland and the Irish in Interwar England. By Mo Moulton.

Ireland and the Irish in Interwar England. By Mo Moulton.

Rural Modernity and the Wood Engraving Revival in Interwar England

‘Rural Modernity and the Wood Engraving Revival in Interwar England’ brings analysis of a specific kind of visual-verbal text, wood-engraved books about the English countryside, and the means of these texts' production, to bear upon debates over rural modernity -what is it, where is it, who owns it-in order to more thoroughly engage literary and arts scholars in debates over the meaning of modernity for rural England and rural England for modernity. Framed by analysis of the work of social historians and cultural critics of rural England and ‘Englishness’, it takes as its supporting case studies two mass-marketed books: A. G. Street's Farmer's Glory (1932), with wood engravings by Gwen Raverat, and Francis Brett Young's Portrait of a Village (1937), with wood engravings by Joan Hassall. I argue that these and other books with wood engravings have a special story to tell about the relation of this interwar ‘flood’ of printed matter to rural England, serving as uniquely productive meeting places for interwar writers, illustrators, publishers, and readers to participate in the paradoxical crisis of England's rural depression and modernisation.

The New Leisure, Voluntarism and Social Reconstruction in Inter-War Britain

In post-World War I social reconstruction, leisure acquired a new meaning as a social good with the capacity to contribute to the building of a new post-war society. A discourse of citizenship and leisure emerged which drew from Christian socialism and the works of John Ruskin, William Morris, and the social idealist thinking of T. H. Green and J. A. Hobson. The classical Athenian model of leisure was re-worked by Ernest Barker and Cecil Delisle Burns who argued that the function of a leisure class could become that of the whole community through a democratic redistribution of leisure. Although efforts to realize idealist visions were rarely successful they were nevertheless important to twentieth-century understandings of leisure and citizenship and brought leisure within the framework of social policy.

Putting the City Back into Citizenship: Civics Education and Local Government in Britain, 1918-45

This article is about interwar Britain, civic education, and the theoretical and practical expression of local citizenship. Building upon recent analyses in urban history that have reassessed the perception of municipal and civic decline, I argue that historians must now also challenge the historiography that views citizenship as indivisible from national identity. It was indeed actually common for both children and adults to be taught that it was in the local, and the city especially, that the rights and responsibilities of citizenship were received and enacted. I trace this distinctive conception of citizenship to the ideological resilience of the Victorian idealist philosopher Thomas Hill Green. Drawing on his justification for state intervention to ensure individual liberty, educators positioned municipal government as the guardian of the life and health of individuals and communities—an educational approach they termed civics. This was apparent in organizations such as the National Association of Local Government Officers, Workers’ Educational Association, and the Association for Education in Citizenship, and expressed through the flood of civics textbooks published following the First World War. Using a case study of Manchester I unpick the points of contact between these organizations and the individuals connected to Green, and show how civics was applied in both formal and informal sites of education. While this discourse of citizenship was damaged by the social democracy of the post-1945 welfare state, I conclude that, in the interwar period at least, citizenship was still very much local and urban based.