by Andrew Marr
A Final Gurgle
At least Lloyd George, settled in grand style in Paris, with a big election victory under his belt, could reflect that the British government was still a master of events. He had established himself as radical firebrand, then reforming cabinet minister, and now wartime leader and world statesman. His writ ran. The empire had never been stronger. Above all, the Royal Navy ruled the seas. Its dominance was symbolized by the floating corpse of its enemy, seventy-four battleships, battle cruisers and other warships of the German High Seas Fleet, all now safely at anchor at Scapa Flow. They had been sailed across the North Sea, greeted by the Royal Navy in full force, with every flag flying, and finally surrendered in the Firth of Forth before being taken to the Orkneys. There was a debate about what to do with them. The French wanted some extra battleships, so did the Italians. The dreaded U-boats had long ago been towed to Harwich and were being destroyed. But the might of the Kaiser’s navy was still afloat, awaiting the final terms of the peace treaty in Paris. For seven months skeleton crews of German sailors would stay on board, bored out of their minds, smoking, playing cards, talking revolution, dancing and combating a growing population of rats while their officers discussed what to do. Rear Admiral Ludwig von Reuter, aboard Scheer’s Jutland flagship, had made his mind up already. If the terms of the treaty were harsh, and the fleet was to be handed over, then better to scuttle the lot. The Paris terms would turn out to be worse than the Germans’ worst nightmares and as the last days of haggling continued, von Reuter prepared for a final two-fingered salute at Britain.
On the day it happened, the British warships guarding the German fleet were themselves out at sea, practising against destroyer attacks with torpedoes, for some future conflict then barely imaginable. The only British afloat in Scapa Flow were a party of 400 Orkney schoolchildren, on a tug boat for a day trip, and a marine artist on a trawler, making sketches of the German battleships. By all accounts 21 June 1919 was an almost perfect day, the kind of translucent, soft summer weather that can make the Highlands and Islands of Scotland feel like paradise. At 10 a.m. Reuter sent all ships his coded message, by flag, light and semaphore, reading simply, ‘paragraph eleven’. The crews went below, opened the sea-cocks and let the chill waters in. Then they wound out the lifeboats and began to abandon ship. Starting with the flagship, Friedrich der Grosse, the ships began to list and go down. Some slowly and placidly subsided. Others upended and went down with great gurgles and hissings. Panicking, the little British guard ships fired on the German sailors and tried to order them back. Vain attempts were made to tow some of the stricken vessels. One German captain waving a white flag was shot in the head. All together, nine Germans were killed. None of it made the slightest difference. Soon Scapa Flow was covered with oil stains and bubbles, refuse and little boats. Hissings and roarings came from all around. The British fleet rushed back, far too late: by early afternoon almost every German ship was on the bottom. Petulant and furious, the British commander shouted abuse at Reuter and his officers: they remained calm and stony-faced. For Reuter, it was the last act of the Great War and something which reduced, if it did not remove, the shame of defeat and surrender. The message, for those who chose to think about it, was that Germany was down but not out – defeated but not reconciled.
Part Three
KEEPING OUR BALANCE
1919–1939
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened . . .
T. S. Eliot, ‘Burnt Norton’, 1935
Great periods of history have names – the Elizabethan age, the Victorian, the Edwardian – but the time between the two slaughters of the twentieth century comes with no monarch attached. We resort to combination: ‘the twenties and the thirties’, as though they were identical and inseparable. Or we say ‘between the wars’ or ‘inter-war Britain’, glossing over these twenty lively years as nothing more than a pause, an intermission between the acts in the twentieth century’s great drama. Some have called it ‘the Age of Baldwin’, after the dominant politician of the time, but few people have much idea who Baldwin was. Those who do remember him have a fuzzy picture of a self-satisfied man smoking a pipe and scratching a pig’s back while Hitler rants offstage. Other political figures are either forgotten entirely or remembered as comic incompetents – Ramsay MacDonald entranced by duchesses, Oswald Mosley posturing in boots. Churchill’s moment was yet to come. So everything about this time seems unsatisfactorily vague. What’s the story? What does it mean for us now?
Only a great banking crisis, mass unemployment and the Depression; only the political class loathed and ridiculed; only the world’s power balance changing as new nations rise in the East; only a people at home enjoying new consumer goods and dreaming dreams of a better way of living. These are the years when imperial Britannia is slipping into history and modern Britain, still an adolescent, is becoming visible. Our memory of these decades seems oddly concerned with headwear – podgy politicians in pork-pie hats, incompetent financiers in top hats, hard-faced manufacturers in bowler hats, flappers in cloche hats, fascists in peaked caps and endless streams of the unemployed, on street corners or hunger marches, their flat caps pulled down tight. Yet despite the neat classification by headgear, it is also a time when nothing leads anywhere. The General Strike is not a revolution. The abdication crisis has become almost incomprehensible. There are all those Oxbridge types promising not to fight for King and Country, but we know they did anyway. The great events of these decades, which include the rise of Nazism, the hideously cruel Soviet experiment, the triumph of Hollywood and Roosevelt’s New Deal, take place far away from our cloudy islands. For Britain, it is the Great Age of Half-Cock. Only with the crisis of 1940 does the country begin to rouse itself and History, properly understood, begin again. One might decide that not only does this period have no name, it does not deserve one.
But what about all those echoes of today? The British of the inter-war years were introduced to Kellogg’s cornflakes and Mars Bars, observed the spread of Sainsbury’s, Marks & Spencer and Dewhurst the butchers. They were (mostly) united for the first time by a national electricity grid, so that the country became bright at night. This was when the British became a people obsessed with home ownership and mortgages. Despite wonderful writers, a culture based on moving pictures in cinemas began to push books aside. At home, pre-television, it was the great radio age. The British began to travel in large numbers for holidays at the coast in the first Butlin’s camps, and some went abroad too. They crammed their narrow roads with cars, became addicted to crime thrillers, began to live in sprawling suburbs and sucked up the new American culture. If you buy organic food, if you have ever been to a nightclub, if you go to a gym, if you take drugs or drink cocktails, read paperback books or listen to the BBC, or ski, or champion the freedom of the motorist, then you have been shaped by what happened in Britain in the twenties and thirties. Many of us live in one of the semi-detached houses or apartment blocks that sprang up; our country is marked by the stalking pylons, roadside pubs, garages and offices built or opened then. Light industry was putting money into the pockets of people we would now call teenagers. Their financial crises and arguments about unemployment feel fresh again today. From the English Midlands to the south coast, at the very least, the thirties felt surprisingly like an early draft of the fifties, or even the early sixties.
For some of the time people were angrier about politics, and with good reason. Foreign policy was what was most likely to kill you. Without a proper welfare state, losing your job or status was much scarier than it is today. The middle classes had servants, not appliances. There wasn’t much litter because there wasn’t much wrapping, and much less to wrap. No motorways and no supermarkets meant local shopping, with baskets over the arm. There was the scent of cigarette smoke everywhere. Four out of five men smoked, and almost half the women. Boys started early and the brands were high-tar, often unti
pped ones, such as the famous Capstan Full Strength, Woodbines and Craven A. The thicker smoke pollution of the cities hanging in the air was, by our standards, almost unbearable. Medical science was still primitive. The worst health disaster was the so-called Spanish Flu epidemic immediately after the First World War, not so very different biologically from more recent ‘bird flu’ viruses, except that it killed around 220,000 people in Britain. Year in, year out, huge numbers of others died from infections or operations which today would be easily treated or routine. Despite the pioneering work of Sir Alexander Fleming, there would be no antibiotics readily available until half way through the next war. Only the children of the middle and upper classes were really well educated. Most left school at fourteen; a tiny handful of adolescents progressed to university. For the poor, hospital treatment was grim and many relied on the kindness of local doctors who dispensed with their fee, sometimes charging richer patients more to make up the difference.
Even when we are following the spoor of something we can all recognize now, such as interest in organic, local food or the need for regular exercise, their origins in the twenties and thirties can seem downright weird. This is a time of cults and crazes – and, it has to be said, of crazies too. Women in flowing gowns doing solemn-faced dances in fields, or men in odd home-made uniforms intoning spiritual gobbledegook at the edge of forests, were trying in their way to find routes to a better future. There was a craze for spiritualism, partly driven by a yearning to contact the ‘lost generation’ left in Flanders. But in general, before television, people were odder. That is, they could follow their own paths without being nationally observed, commented upon or so easily ridiculed. Less education, and a smaller media, meant there was more eccentricity. That produced its own kind of freedom. Britain was bigger then. That is, there were around 16 million fewer people in the same space, which seemed bigger too because it was harder to get around. For those with cars and living near cities travel was often faster, but for the majority it was slow and rare. So regional accents were stronger and local habits more diverse. Only the upper classes, and bohemians, knew much about abroad. Yet people who really couldn’t take Britain any more could get out. The political elite spent half the year by the Mediterranean. The most reactionary aristocrats decamped to hunt, farm, drink and lord it over the natives in East Africa. Ambitious lower-middle-class or working-class people could go to Canada or Australia. During the twenties, more than half a million people left, though the thirties, which are meant to be so dreary, saw a big change. In net terms, 650,000 immigrants came here.90 They were, of course, mostly white.
Those living through this period often talked of being a ‘post-war’ generation. Apart from a few hyper-alert and prescient people, they did not know a worse war was coming. But it was the most important self-description for the period. The Great War seemed to have sliced away most of what went before it. Old habits of deference, old authorities, had gone. The question was now: ‘How shall we live?’ Not everyone bothered to ask it. But the most interesting people did, whether their reply was to drink and take drugs, or to live in a rural community, or fall for a new political creed. And a word of caution should be said here about the political extremism. An extraordinary number of people appear in this book who are attracted to fascist thinking – Churchill included. A few were real extremists, hostile to democracy, ready for violence. Most were vaguely anti-Jewish in a snobbish but entirely peaceful way. Many more still had been entranced by Mussolini than by Hitler, and thought some kind of strong national regime would help defeat unemployment. It is vital to try to think ourselves back into a world before the Holocaust, before the Waffen SS and before Nazi Germany’s violent expansion. They did not know what we know. Something similar can be said about those – never many – who became communists. Sharp-eyed observers brought back accurate stories of the hideous nature of Stalin’s regime but thousands of idealists simply refused to believe them. They were blinded in part by their fear of the fascists; just as the fascists justified thuggery by their genuine fear of ‘Bolsheviks’.
Let us not be too smug about these great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents. For above all, most of them voted in their millions for moderate and even timid parties. Dull though most of Britain’s politicians were, we can thank our lucky stars, or our lucky birthplace, that they presided over a country so complacent, hidebound, unthinkingly loyal to its increasingly suburban monarchy and so stupefied by the fading glory of its past, that it never fell for thrilling politics as most of the rest of Europe had. Politicians used to compliment one another on having common-sense ballast, or ‘bottom’. In the 1931 general election, fifty-five per cent of voters went for the Conservatives. In 1935, the National Government did almost as well. Most other voters opted for middle-of-the-road Labour. Just 0.1 per cent voted Communist. The twenties and thirties were a time of idealism and sparkling visions of new futures, but they were also when the British were saved by a low centre of gravity – by Britannia’s vast and heavy buttocks, her unimaginative, tea-swilling, bovine inability to be easily excited. These were the years when, despite every temptation, we kept our balance.
Grief and Gaiety
On 9 November 1920, a few platoons of British soldiers set out once more for the front. Led by one officer apiece, they went to the still-churned, still-slimy ground where great slaughters, at Ypres, Cambrai, Arras and the Somme, had taken place. They marched to a place of rough wooden crosses without markings, where dead Britons too torn about to be identified had been buried. Just one body was dug up from each site, placed in a plain deal coffin and then brought back to a small chapel. Next, an officer was blindfolded and led into it. He reached out and touched one of the four coffins. The other three were returned to be reburied. The fourth was then taken by train to the Channel, where it was met by a warship and placed inside a larger casket of oak, specially made from a tree cut down in Hampton Court forest. With an escort of destroyers and given the admiral’s nineteen-gun salute as it passed, the dead man – a Scot or a Welshman, a Nottinghamshire miner or a Devon public schoolboy, a man who had died bravely or in terror – no one knew who he was – was then taken to London. Two days after being dug up in France, he was paraded through the streets, his pallbearers being field marshals and admirals, until he was buried deep in the sand below Westminster Abbey. On his coffin rested an antique sword from the King’s collection. In the next days and weeks, more than a million people came to say goodbye. Outside, in Whitehall, 100,000 wreaths had almost hidden the base of the brand new Cenotaph.
Reclaiming, and giving a state burial to, an unknown soldier had been the idea of a young army padre, later a vicar in Margate, called David Railton. He passed the idea to the Dean of Westminster, who wrote to the King. George was initially against the notion, worrying that it was too morbid, but he was won round. As the writer Ronald Blythe later said, ‘The affair was morbid, but grandly and supremely so.’ It proved hugely popular and cathartic, partly because it was in its way democratic. Millions of bereaved parents, brothers and sisters could half-believe that the recovered body was theirs, and certainly that it represented their dead boy. There had been much argument about the different treatment of aristocratic or upper-class corpses, which might be returned for burial at home, and the great mass of the dead who were left near to where they fell. Overall, the funerary democrats – led by the poet Kipling – won the argument for all to be treated alike in death, officers and men lying alongside one another with similar headstones. This was not trivial. At a time of revolution abroad, democracy needed to be symbolized. These were the years of the memorials: the vast Commonwealth memorials in France, requiring their own large bureaucracy and the factory-scale cutting of headstones; the thousands of granite crosses, sculpted Tommies and gold-painted wooden boards in villages, schools, train stations and city squares. In every style from the mimicry of ancient Greek and Egyptian funerary art to the latest in angular modernism, the British raised up and then lived in a garde
n of death.
Though there was not, in statistical terms, a lost generation as is sometimes still claimed, the three-quarters of a million dead were a ghostly presence everywhere; faces staring out of school and sporting photographs, empty upstairs bedrooms in suburban houses, silent family meals, odd gaps in offices or village pubs between the old and the very young. In the ten years after the war 29,000 small country estates were sold off, often simply because there was no heir to inherit them. The wounded and maimed were also visible everywhere. They might be blind, gassed, distressingly unpredictable, hobbling with empty trouser-legs or pinned-up arms. The worst were still coping with open wounds which needed to be dressed daily to staunch infection. New plastic surgery techniques, still crude, could last until the late 1920s before patched-up faces were ready. Unsettling smells broke through the cigarette smoke. Park benches were sometimes painted blue to warn passers-by that they were reserved for badly wounded men from hospital, in their floppy serge uniforms and blue caps. The exuberance of blood – the erect spirit – of Edwardian times had been drained. Though in theory there were enough men for most women to marry, that was cold arithmetical nonsense for the hundreds of thousands who had lost the only one they loved, and who were still wearing black and would never wed. The current author is old enough, just, to remember great-aunts who did not marry ‘because of the War’ and lived single lives – albeit quite cheerful ones – focused on fruit cake and friendship.
