The Making of Modern Britain

by Andrew Marr

  Immediately after the war, the housing was mostly public, or local authority, under the leadership of Christopher Addison, a Liberal reformer who later joined Labour. But despite the high-flown hopes of the 1919 Addison Act, slum clearance was a great inter-war failure. To start with, there were nothing like enough qualified builders available after the culling of the trenches. It was reckoned that in 1920 only half the bricklayers and plasterers needed in London could be found. Nor was there enough money. Addison himself was sacked when it emerged that his houses would cost twice the original estimate. Despite much campaigning by church leaders and rising journalists such as George Orwell, not nearly enough new homes were built to begin to rid urban working-class Britain of stinking, insanitary and overcrowded Victorian dwellings, generally without such amenities as damp courses. Where politicians were ambitious, as the Clydeside Catholic John Wheatley was during the second Labour government, the constrictions imposed by hard times frustrated them. Apart from a short time immediately after the Great War, private building outstripped public housing easily – by 1939, nine out of ten new-built homes were private, and three-quarters of them were built by speculative building firms.

  It was a vast housing boom, only equalled by the boom in high-rises in the late sixties and seventies, producing nearly 4 million new houses. It was based on lax planning laws, cheap land, vigorously aggressive building societies and speculative builders working to simple, repetitive designs. One example of the new housing entrepreneurs was a sixteen-year-old boy who taught himself brick-laying, glazing, woodwork and plumbing so he could erect a pair of houses for his family in Blackpool. Passers-by offered to buy them before the roofs were on. He made a handsome profit and never looked back. In 1921 his uncle came into the business – the boy’s name was Frank Taylor; his uncle’s Jack Woodrow. Their firm became the giant Taylor Woodrow. All over Britain, rows of so-called Mock Tudor, Brewer’s Tudor or Tudorbethan houses that ripple out of almost every major city in Britain were clustered on the arterial roads because land beside the new roads was blighted and cheap. Names such as Taylor Woodrow, Wimpey and Laing were among the firms already producing prefabricated joinery details, a mix-and-match variety of bay windows, half-timbered frontages, gable details and porches, the whole covered with pebbledash, hanging tiles or concrete render to hide sometimes slapdash bricklaying. Architects, as such, were rarely involved. One builders’ magazine commented that ‘it is undeniable that a sound well-planned house can be erected almost equally well from a series of sketches on the back of an old envelope as from a neatly executed and carefully coloured working drawing’.103

  The result was a bottom-up native rebuke to modernism which has far more impact on how Britain looks than any immigrant modernist. This is what we have been left with: an architecture which, instead of stripping back unnecessary detail, piled it on; which preferred sloping roofs to flat and rough surfaces to smooth; which painted on wood beams and added twiddly bits; which sprawled a little, rather than kept its toes in; and which instituted the kitchen as the cosiest and most often-used room in the house. Compared to the terraced houses of earlier speculative building booms, it proved a handy place, with fewer floors and far fewer stairs. Because these millions of houses took up space in the south-east of England, and between urban villages where there had recently still been fields or copses, and because they seemed to cringe a little, looking upwards architecturally at their betters, they were cordially despised by intellectuals. It is the England where Orwell’s aspidistras are always flying. These were not homes for struggling factory workers, still less the unemployed. They were homes for teachers, clerks, skilled workers, policemen and the like, people who suddenly found themselves able to borrow money for mortgages with which to buy quite cheap houses. They express the conservatism of British society, the small dreams easy to sneer at, particularly in an age of big ideas. One recent architectural historian points out that they were built after a horrific world war: ‘For many, a mythological Elizabethan age and the Tudor past represented an age of stability and secure living . . . [producing] a house that at least gave an outward impression of unshakeable stability.’104 There is much in that. They were also, of course, the places where many of the next generation of intellectuals, to their retrospective fury, would be born and raised.

  There were modernist housing projects by local authority builders and planners, who copied their rounded corners, steel-framed windows and flat roofs from architectural magazines and exhibitions, and they offered some working-class families a better way of living, with gas heating, separate bathrooms and more natural light. The classic modern buildings of the age reflected – not surprisingly – the new enthusiasms and industries. They were public, not private. There were strikingly modern airport buildings at Gatwick, Heston, Shoreham and Jersey, the earlier and jaw-droppingly large airship hangars at Cardington, and light-engineering factories such as the famous Hoover Building of 1932–5 in west London. Road building was minimal by German standards, but the fashion for ‘roadhouses’ – airy places to stop, with bars and restaurants – brought art deco to the suburbs and countryside along the new roads. It was an age of sun-worship and thus of the open-air lidos. Transport projects included the massive Liverpool Mersey Tunnel of 1925, with newfangled catseyes, a great British invention, and the skyscraper-like St George’s ventilation tower. Garages were new-fangled too, of course: the Bluebird Garage of 1924 in London’s Kings Road was the largest in Europe when it opened, with space for 300 cars. By 1937, when the Olympia Garage opened nearby, it had eleven concrete floors, the curving ramps familiar to everyone now, and space for 1,000 cars.

  We are not yet really in the car age. Photographs of those Tudor semis from the thirties show a few cars parked in the driveways, not hundreds of them. There were around 100,000 cars on British roads at the time of the Armistice and 2 million by the time Chamberlain had failed to appease Hitler. But the Fordist mass-production techniques had arrived. Cheap, popular cars of the twenties such as the Bullnose Morris and the Austin Seven, small and quirky and somehow essentially English, had been built by hand. Soon those companies, but also Alvis, Wolseley, Triumph, Sunbeam and Rover, were producing metal-pressed and mass-made vehicles and the small, winding roads of Britain were filling up. The narrowness of ancient British city streets and of most old roads meant that, apart from a small number of highly expensive vehicles, the British car already seemed pinched, boxy and mildly apologetic compared with the more expansive, show-off, exhibitionist automobiles of America, Germany and Italy. Even here, modernism had its limits.

  Outside Britain, modernism meant sun-worship, often nudism, and mass gymnastics: some of the earliest modernist buildings were Swiss sanatoria. Health meant being free and being active. It could mean new, energetic rhythmic dances, brought by gurus such as Rudolf Laban in Germany. Though the British climate and the smoky air of British cities meant most people kept their kit firmly on, even in this country the fresh-air fad took sporadic hold. Sunbathing became popular, even if it was treated with an endearing earnestness – one guide published in 1931 suggested various ways of ‘exposing the naked body to the solar rays’, but particularly recommended a sun-box, which protected the bather from the wind, or ‘reclining on a bed in a ventilated glass solarium . . . a cold wet cloth over the head’. Beach holidays were hugely popular, though in most parts of Britain a strict dress code limited too much exposure of the body until the mid-thirties: for instance men were not permitted to wear bathing costumes that let their chests be seen – except on Brighton beach, which has always been a law unto itself. Sunlamps and sun lounges were widely used and the first sunglasses sold. Flouncy Edwardian bathing dresses were replaced by one-piece woollen costumes and eventually, for men, trunks. Rubber bathing caps arrived, then figure-hugging swimwear, bra-and-pants combinations and cork sandals. In general, the British seaside at the beginning of the twenties featured people who might have been mistaken for Victorians. By the end of the thirties they looked
much like us. In our holiday moods, if not our houses or cars, we were leaving the good old days behind.

  Downhill all the Way

  For the British, as for the French, Italians, Germans and Americans, the inter-war period was the time when the thrill of speed caught on. Until then, apart from a handful of pioneer aviators, motor-car enthusiasts and yachtsmen, the only way you could go fast by yourself and take risks was on the back of a horse. But after the Great War, speeding became an obsession, linked to notions of freedom, national destiny and modernism. It was the age of the first British Grand Prix, the time of the Schneider Trophy, which saw seaplanes roaring round Bournemouth and Cowes, watched by hundreds of thousands of spectators. It was the era of rich young things flying themselves across Europe and of flying circuses which allowed ordinary people to clamber into the back of a biplane and experience, for a fee, the thrill of looping the loop for themselves. And it was the golden age of skiing, the birth of what has become a mass sport, utterly transforming the Alps and many other mountain ranges in the pursuit of the simple thrill of sliding down hills at speed.

  A shrewd and pious Edwardian Liberal called Sir Henry Lunn was first at the top of the slope – though only metaphorically, since he did not ski himself. The son of a Lincolnshire greengrocer, he had two religious experiences at the ages of nine and seventeen, and became a missionary and preacher. Convinced that his great calling was to bind the fractured Christian churches of the West, he organized conferences to bring together Anglicans, Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians and some Catholics. He chose Switzerland. Its valleys had become a favourite winter destination for rich travellers ever since 1864, when an entrepreneurially minded hotel-keeper in a remote mountain village bet some British guests that they would find the Alpine winter delightful, rather than horrifying, which was the accepted view of high, cold snowy places at the time. It worked. They stayed, they paid, and they brought all their friends. His village was called St Moritz and Switzerland, not to mention Alpine France and parts of Austria, has never been the same since. Lunn began organizing his Christian unity conferences, with a lot of high-altitude praying. The churches never unified but he proved to have as shrewd a nose for business as that first Swiss hotelier and began organizing winter sports holidays for the better-off Edwardians. His name survives as half of Lunn-Poly, the package tour operator.

  Winter sports, in those days, mostly meant skating and tobogganing. Skiing, which had been a provincially obscure way of getting from one place to another, was a poor relation. As a sport, it had started in Norway and Sweden with peasants teaching urbanites their techniques, and was only slowly spreading to the Alps. It involved very long wooden skis, ordinary leather boots and a single pole, used for balance and braking. It also involved endless rows about technique – literally, how to get down a slope without breaking bones and maintaining some kind of control. It was uncomfortable, dangerous and very, very cold. Skiing was as much about getting up the hills, using sealskins to grip the snow, as it was about sliding down them again. Various Austrian, German and Swiss pioneers were soon devising the snowplough and parallel-turn techniques familiar to any modern skier, but there was one Briton whose contribution was so huge that he is still remembered throughout the skiing world.

  He was another Lunn, Sir Henry’s son Arnold, who after flunking Oxford and setting up university skiing clubs, went on to invent the slalom race. At the time, skiing was rather like orienteering in the snow. When Lunn devised a fast downhill race with lots of turns, Norwegians protested: what would the English think if they tried to change the rules of cricket? It would probably result in better cricket, Lunn retorted. Anyway, ‘It has never been the habit of the British to follow blindly where others lead.’ The initial British skiing race had taken place as early as 1903, when the first British club, the Davos Ski Club, was formed, and in 1911 the imperial war hero Lord Roberts of Kandahar sponsored a skiing cup for the Public Schools Alpine Sports Club. What was skiing like then? Lunn recalled that race as ‘a climb of seven and a half hours to the starting point, a night in an Alpine hut and a racing course which included three miles across a glacier, a short climb, a descent of 5,000 feet, including 1,500 feet of difficult windswept crust and 1,000 feet of very tricky running through a wood. This was a course for heroes.’

  The Great War, unsurprisingly, halted the growing British skiing obsession, though interned soldiers made the most of Swiss mountainsides. But after it Arnold Lunn returned to the slopes. ‘At the end of 1919 I found myself the owner of a small silver cup which had been purchased before the war for a prize in a golf competition which was never held. I decided to give the cup for a new type of skiing competition.’ Lunn was himself a skier and mountaineer of heroic accomplishments and great personal bravery: he had shattered one leg in a Welsh climbing accident before the war and was in great lifelong pain. One leg being shorter than the other, he had to devise different bindings for his skis, which did not seem to hold him back. In 1922 the first slalom race was held under his guidance: most fast skiing derives from that breakthrough experiment. The (British) Kandahar Ski Club, with its distinctive K badge, led the charge for the new sport of fast-turning skiing, followed by the Downhill Only Club and many more. By the end of the decade the British rules for downhill and slalom skiing had been internationally accepted, and skiing was an Olympic sport. From the mid-twenties through to the early thirties, British skiers were rivalled only by the Swiss for speed and technique, and brought to Switzerland the hard-partying, mildly glamorous atmosphere the great Swiss resorts enjoyed between the wars. The golden age would end only with the rise of fascism.

  It remained a tough sport. It involved huge amounts of slogging uphill to find the runs, and the few ‘hard snow’ pistes were flattened only by scores of helpers using their boots to stamp it down – on one occasion employing the services of Alpine troops for mass stamping. Though a primitive ski lift was reported from the Black Forest in 1906, the first engine-driven lifts did not appear in the central Alps until 1935–6, and chair lifts, invented in America, did not arrive until after the Second World War. A competent skier had to understand many different types of snow, and find his or her route through the mountains, sometimes squinting through home-made wooden slats with eyeholes to prevent snow-blindness. Lunn later recalled: ‘The pioneers of Alpine skiing . . . loved the mountains. They enjoyed skiing but they regarded the long descent as a glorious extra, a bonus.’ Yet the sheer thrill, which he had done so much to encourage, was what brought ever larger numbers of adventurous holidaymakers to the Swiss and French Alps between the wars. The boat train into Victoria became crammed with sunburned men and women in tweeds and plus-fours, often sporting broken arms and legs as they returned to tell stories of heroism and haplessness. It seems that the essence of skiing was not so very different from today. In the late 1920s Lunn himself asked: ‘Do we ever enjoy skiing, I wonder? For we are always either skiing too fast and frightened, or too slow and ashamed.’ By then, plenty of other people knew what he meant.

  Off in a Flying Boat

  For those lucky enough to afford the fares, these were the golden early years of air travel. Few journeys can have started as romantically as a flight to somewhere in Africa or India on an Imperial Airways flying boat in the mid-thirties. You would check in at the cleanly modernistic new terminal near Buckingham Palace, where after presenting your ticket you would be surreptitiously weighed – in early aircraft every pound counted, but the nice people at Imperial did not want fat passengers to feel embarrassed. You would pass over your luggage, maximum 33lb, board a special Pullman carriage at nearby Victoria station and be whisked to Southampton, to the luxury South Western Hotel. At 5 a.m. the following day you would be woken and taken to Berth 101. There you would cross a floating gangway to a raft, and then climb into the side of a Short Imperial Flying Boat, an 18-ton, 88-foot monster built along the coast at Rochester. Settling into its ‘promenade saloon’ with your fellow dozen passengers, you would notice the sof
t luxury leather armchairs, the carpets, the smell of breakfast being prepared. As the craft roared across Southampton water, sending plumes of spray over the window, you would settle down to read your free guidebook, and follow a map showing the journey down to the Mediterranean, then the great British airport at Alexandria, and thence perhaps to India or central Africa. In the air, making a good 200 m.p.h., you would enjoy the huge picture windows and sit back. One guide to world airlines reckoned that ‘voyage by Imperial Flying Boat is the most comfortable air travel in the world . . . Plenty of space, fresh air and good ventilation, heating, excellent catering, attentive stewards.’105

  Even for those undertaking a shorter plane trip to Paris, Amsterdam or Berlin, the experience was far more like that enjoyed by a private jet owner now than by most of the air-travelling public of today. You would be a rare and lucky traveller, but by 1935 hardly a unique one: Imperial alone was carrying 68,000 people that year. The first glimpse of the modern air-travel economy was visible. It had been a bumpy flight to reach this semi-modern industry, however. In strict terms the first regular air service in Britain dated back to 1910 and a Hendon-to-Windsor mail run, but this was little more than a gimmick. In the same year an act of Parliament had asserted that the air over Britain and her dominions was inviolable by outsiders, intended with heroic optimism ‘to protect the nation against aviation’.106 The war, of course, had accelerated the technical advances in aviation so that by 1918 British aircraft were easily able to reach Berlin. The following year Alcock and Brown completed the first non-stop transatlantic flight and it was obvious to everyone that a new age of air travel was not far away. Even as the fighting drew to a close, RAF and freelance operators were flying mail to the continent. The first commercial passenger flight seems to have been between Heston and Le Bourget in France on 15 July 1919: there was one passenger behind the pilot who, meant to land at Hounslow to clear Customs, simply could not be bothered. By now it had become clear to the British government that its old hostility to allowing free access to national airspace was horribly misplaced. Aircraft still could not fly very far, and any British machines wishing to get anywhere else would have to cross over France, Belgium, Germany and other neighbouring countries. Yet although an agreement was signed at the Paris peace conference, rows about airspace erupted again and again, slowing down the possibilities of genuinely popular air travel.