"People only see the thirties as a prelude to the war, in the same way that they see the Edwardian period as a prelude to WW1, but in a very different way. People often look back on the Edwardian period as a golden age that was ruptured and dislocated by war but regard the 1930s as an inevitable plod towards Armageddon. ... [This] was very much a hindsight view – the thirties was also a period of high modernism, of experimentation and of optimism. Although that’s not to deny all the other aspects, like the Depression and the poverty. ... Nobody in the thirties, apart from politicians, really knew, or wanted to know, until 1938, that there was going to be war.
Writers in the 1930s gave contrasting pictures of life. There’s George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier and his descriptions of the bleak living conditions among the working classes in the depression-hit industrial north. Then you have J. B. Priestley’s English Journey, where the focus is more on the growth of new suburbs and consumer affluence. Which one was more accurate?
Both were right. It literally depended on where you were. If you were an unskilled worker in heavy industries that were in freefall – industries like iron and steel, coal and textiles, which had really been in decline since before WW1 – they tended to be situated in the north, the northeast, around the Clyde and the Mersey, and in the Welsh valleys. And we mustn’t forget that Cornwall and Somerset were also very poor counties at the time.
On the other hand, if you lived in the south or the Midlands and you were skilled or even semi-skilled and had a job in one of the new industries such as the car industry, which was really burgeoning at the time, or synthetic textiles or pharmaceuticals or domestic goods manufacturing, then you were much more prosperous. So it really was a divided society geographically.
The blueprints for the welfare state were all obviously laid in the thirties and a lot of social experiments were tried out but were never rolled out because of WW2. ... A lot of schemes ran into the sand at that time but they were there ready to be unrolled when the time was more propitious.
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Casual anti-semitism was fairly pervasive at the time.
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Architectural modernism came to Britain with refugees from Nazi Germany, like Gropius and Mendelsohn. ... Many creative and scientific people felt that they had the tools to create a better world and a moral responsibility to do so and I think that modernism is a lot to do with that. It’s a rejection of the hypocrisy, the fussiness and the fustiness of Victorianism in Britain, and all the things that were perceived to have led to World War I. It was a rejection of the complacent world that drifted into war. ... The real 1930s architecture was suburbia. And there was a great deal of snobbishness about it. There were more than four million houses built between the wars. Three million of them were built by private developers and most of those were suburban. They were either on new estates or on arterial roads, the so-called ribbon developments, until they were stopped. The semi, with the pitched roof and the mullion windows and the faux Tudor beams and the little neat garden, was very much mocked at the time by the “smart”. People didn’t like them because they encroached on the countryside. They liked a strong division between country and town and hated the idea that people could appropriate the countryside. There was a big debate in the thirties about what the countryside was for because it was no longer really very productive. What was going to happen to it? Was it just going to be paved over? Suburbs often exemplified people’s dreams. The sort of people that could afford a suburban semi at this time were not really working class unless they were very lucky. Normally they were lower-middle-class people who had often lived in inner-city areas that were very insalubrious and overcrowded and this was a dream for them. For the first time funds became widely available for mortgages, so people who wouldn’t have been able to get a mortgage before were able to. Most people until the 1920s lived in private rented accommodation, often with unscrupulous landlords or landlords with very little money to make improvements. So being an owner-occupier was a huge social and emotional step.
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Homosexuality was much more tolerated in the thirties than we realise. It was after WW2 that you really got a crackdown on homosexuality. If you look back at the diaries of Virginia Woolf there was obviously a great deal of homosexuality and bisexuality, including Virginia Woolf herself.
Even in working-class communities, homosexuality was much more accepted than one would have believed. One tends to have a Whig interpretation of history, that people have got more tolerant as time goes on, but it’s not necessarily true.
Between men and women, there were far more separate spheres. As a man you went out with your mates. You went to the pub, the football or the music hall. Women fulfilled a different function and relations with women were much more about courting. You would probably just sit at home or might go out to a dance hall. So there were both these reasons. But the important thing was the lack of essentialism. Only the nancy boys and rent boys and real exhibitionists soliciting around Leicester Square were regarded as something very different.
