SING AS WE GO
Britain Between the Wars By Simon Heffer
Hutchinson Heinemann
■ Simon Heffer’s fourth and final volume in his monumental chronicle of Britain, which traces the country’s history from the accession of Queen Victoria to 1939, focuses on the two decades between the European wars of the 20th century. The narrative charts a period marked by national turmoil, such as the General Strike of 1926 and the Abdication Crisis of 1936. The story is set against the backdrop of the bouncy 1934 film Sing As We Go, starring Gracie Fields, which sought to boost spirits in the depths of the Great Depression.
Those seemingly carefree days of cocktails and flappers were also a time of deep tension, brought on by the widespread fear of Bolshevism, street riots in places such as Luton and Wolverhampton, as well as threats of widespread industrial action by rail workers and even the police in London and Liverpool, who staged a walkout over a ban on officers joining a union.
Britain emerged from the Great War badly scarred but victorious, only to sink into a state of unrest precipitated by soaring unemployment, strikes, appalling living conditions for many ex-servicemen and, not least of all, fears of an alliance between Labour and Sinn
Féin’s republican movement. Realising the potential for growing unrest, David Lloyd George’s government responded ingeniously by lifting the ban on the sale of high-strength beer.
Heffer makes the point that it wasn’t just middle-class professionals whose way of life was altered in the postwar years. The lives of the urban lower-middle class were changing as well and it was this segment of society that spearheaded the urban exodus to the new suburbs in search of an existence free of overcrowding, pollution and unsanitary conditions. It was no coincidence that this escapist movement made the inter-war period ‘the Golden Age of the detective novel’, as the author states, as immortalised in the 1920s thrillers of Agatha Christie. The two-decade period of Britain’s ups and downs that Heffer covers in this meticulously researched volume comes to its dramatic finale under the dark cloud of another unthinkable conflagration. The story concludes with Neville Chamberlain’s radio message to the nation, telling the British people that this period of what
Heffer terms ‘a turbulent peace’ has ended with another declaration of war against Germany. It was, the author says, one of the great pronouncements of British history.